CASE STUDY

Modernizing Child Services and Family Courts

In 2019, only three states in the U.S. did not provide an online, digital portal for a single, custodial parent to apply for child support—Mississippi, Alabama, and the District of Columbia.

The District of Columbia Office of Attorney General (OAG), Karl Racine, activated an initiative to modernize the Child Services Support Division (CSSD) through a grant program from the federal Health and Human Services’s Administration for Children & Families (ACF).

The online application was only Phase 1 of the modernization effort. Phases 2 and 3 would require updates to the Initiation & Establishment work in a case, followed by the support for preparation to adjudicate and enforce any obligation ordered by the Family Courts.

I was the only UX architect and UI designer on the modernization team.

Challenges

I. Online Application

  • Convert a 7-page PDF form into an online web app with a responsive experience across desktop and mobile devices.

  • Allow users to create an account to save, exit, and return before completing and submitting their app.

  • Allow the user to attach documents to support claims for their child/ren and a non-custodial parent.

  • Design the first-ever online CSSD application.

II. Initiation & Establishment

  • Allow case workers to cooperate as teams within the software.

  • Give managers more insight on tasks and performance.

  • Develop training for case workers in order to sunset legacy systems.

  • Design the first-ever team-based case overview.

III. Family Courts

  • Provide a simple, trackable hand-off from the Establishment team to the Family Courts team.

  • Make court orders and obligations accessible, accurate, and available to all teams and judges.

  • Design the first-ever digital court order tool for the bench.

  • Design the first-ever multi-document packet generator and a new interstate UIFSA standard.

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Conditions

The entire environment—the application, documents, cases, court orders, obligations—would need to be built on the Salesforce platform, which would prove perfect for managing and tracking large schema of personae and project objects, but would also require extensive translation from an aging legacy system to the new, modern data framework.

Without a full product design team, I developed a process for collaborating with project managers, SMEs, business analysts, OAG staff, and developers, each within a clear, specific task and narrow scope for a UX/UI/IA need:

  • Interviews for interdisciplinary, multi-user research.

  • Sprint planning, updating projects, and issue tracking in Jira.

  • Responsive layouts designed in Adobe XD for internal teams.

  • Rapid prototyping high-fidelity interfaces in Avonni software.

  • Testing on/offline for iterating in cycles and patterns.

I converted everyone I worked with into a member of the design team.

Web Application / Mobile

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Sprint 23 - Designer Role

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High-level 2.0 Workflow

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Case Overview

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Court Order Application

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UIFSA Packet Generator

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Nic joined an exceptionally difficult project and created elegant, usable, responsive interfaces… Our team and our customers loved working with him... He is an awesome designer, a dedicated team member, and a great listener. He has my highest endorsement.

Chris Tonjes
Chief Information Officer
D.C. Office of Attorney General

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Results

During the project, much of the team was distributed throughout the U.S. and the Washington, DC metro area, with an onsite group at OAG offices. As the COVID-19 pandemic escalated rapidly, our team was able to adjust, collaborate, and continue producing without interruption.

In fact, we were able to deliver on every milestone…

  • Ahead of schedule.

  • Under budget.

  • Beyond the original scope.

Our modernization team began to lose members when a newly elected D.C. Attorney General assumed office. While the initiative remained, it was reviewed and re-prioritized, and we were all eventually overcome by political and business decisions. Our contracts were abruptly paused with only 10% of the team returning for a transition effort.

Only the online application was fully released and is still available for District residents. In the first year of the online app, of the CSSD’s 24,000 cases, 12% came directly from users (mostly mobile) and another 40+% from publicly available kiosks (mobile tablets) throughout the District.