Designing with Users: USDS at Ed
In honor of Public Service Recognition Week, the U.S. Digital Service is telling the stories of how our teams connect citizens with their government.
At the end of 2016, Carola Ponce, along with other members of the Department of Education (Ed) Digital Service team, conducted a discovery sprint for the Federal Student Aid program (FSAID). The FSAID program allows student and parents to identify themselves electronically in order to access the Federal Student Aid websites. Carola and the Digital Service team examined how electronically identifying oneself was a common pain point for many students and parents when applying for financial aid benefits to attend college.
While gathering feedback from users about their experience with FSAID, Carola met Heather, a counselor at Leadership Public High School in Fremont, CA.
Heather has worked at Leadership Public High School 10 out of the 11 years the school has been in existence. She is one of three counselors, leading the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, and Cash for College nights at a school of 570 students, 120 of them seniors.
Heather helped over 90 parents and all 120 seniors during the spring semester alone. She helped each student and parent sign up for an FSAID and fill out a FAFSA application, at times helping them sign up for an email account. In doing so, Heather was faced with a challenge. Not all parents have working emails and those who do, don’t check into their emails often or remember the password. Some parents struggle with language, technical skills, and many are first generation immigrants.
Carola understood this challenge all too well, as Spanish was her parents’ first language and she is well aware that there often isn’t enough Spanish translators available for all parents.
For Carola, the most eye opening part of talking to Heather was learning the way she kept records. She had her own step-by-step documentation on google docs, which she carefully crafted to help students and parents in order to track everyone’s progress. Heather understood the importance of correctly filling out a FASFA application; in her own words: “this is the only chance these kids have at going to college.” In fact, as she has continued to work with Heather, Carola has learned that just like Heather, there are so many committed school administrators that use this type of organization to fill in the blanks on applications when the tools get too difficult for the most vulnerable populations.
Carola and the Ed Digital Service Team used Heather’s documents to brainstorm where some of the most difficult pain points were in the existing FASFA and FSAID applications.
Interactions like these are why designing better government digital services with users on the ground is so important. In order to understand how the services are truly being used, interacted with, and where pain points are met, technologists like Carola and others at the USDS make designing with users not only a priority, but a requirement.
Carola Ponce is a designer with the United States Digital Service
