I built the first Experience Design team for NIC Pennsylvania, which turned into consulting with other NIC offices to develop their experience design teams. We partnered with the Governor’s Office and Office of Administration on service design improvements to agency services. Launched the first enterprise open-source design system that improved trust in government services. We designed, built, and released the ExpressForms platform, resulting in $50M in new licensing and fees, saving $110M in call center costs.
Government For The People
When I joined NIC Inc.’s Pennsylvania office, they were little more than an IT service provider that maintained contracts for maintaining commonwealth websites and specific payment processing portals. I was hired to build a new component to serve their partner, service design, and improve the customer experience within government digital functions. I was their first-ever Director of Experience Design, a hire that required input and blessing from the Governor’s Office. Upon understanding the business structure, business model, and SLA, I focused on our nascent design team, comprised of one designer and one front-end developer who technically lived on the engineering team. I proposed expanding the team to include a content designer, researcher, and accessibility specialist.
My first order of business is to understand our current services to our partner in the form of all of the SharePoint (and a few WordPress) websites we built and managed. I performed extensive site architecture and navigation reviews and developed a ten-point plan to address our current templates and implementation inadequacies. This ten-point plan aimed to improve the website’s usability, navigation, and performance to understand better how various services attached to those sites performed, using quantitative data analytics and user feedback. Each week, we met with our partners in the Governor’s Office and Office of Administration to discuss SLAs, ongoing projects, new priorities, and new findings and proposals from our team. Our commonwealth partners approved the ten-point plan, and for the next three months, we made significant improvements to our template performance that resulted in public sentiment regarding various commonwealth websites moving from negative to neutral feelings.
ExpressForms
Our partner needed the capability to quickly build customized online forms that could connect to our payment processing technology. Our previous integration of processing payments required clunky implementation for on-premise service installation. Still, it could utilize a layered over technology already approved by the Office of Administration if the routing of payments was correctly configured. My team and I took a defunct low-code platform NIC Federal had previously developed and reworked the product into a streamlined form, building a no-code platform that any non-technical individual could visually develop and test. I led the product design and development, serving as lead designer and product manager for this work. We launched ExpressForms in late 2018 and had six agencies running the pilot program.
Our pilot program worked beyond expectation, with six agencies receiving a collective 91% form completion and successful payment processing. In 2019, we expanded ExpressForm’s backend capabilities with user access and management tools, sandbox capabilities, and self-service deployment to all Commonwealth agencies. In 2019, we saw the explosion of over 4,000 ExpressForm live in Pennsylvania with an average form completion rate of 92% and the exact figures for forms utilizing our connected payment processor. It was estimated that the cost savings that ExpressForms created for the Commonwealth is around $120M in reducing call center costs across the Commonwealth agencies.
Our project and account manager took the reins of ExpressForms in 2019 to manage the intake for special requests and integrations for future product development.
Building an Experience Design Team
My work around our ten-point plan identified more needs than technical implementation. The need for information architecture, content planning, and user research came to the forefront as we were becoming tasked with more work around service design. I was approved to build a team as I saw fit to serve our Commonwealth partner. I hired a content strategist, a user researcher with deep data visualization background, and an additional front-end developer. A product specialist on the ExpressForms team had a deep passion for accessible products. I brought her over as a lateral move, where she would serve on the Experience Design and ExpressForms product teams. In addition to my practitioner, a project manager was assigned to the Experience Design team to help me manage my multiple parallel projects. This grew my team from two to seven direct reports.
Building a team this quickly and each having their domain could be a tricky endeavor for even seasoned leaders. I made a customized onboarding program for new members and helped them acclimate to our new team and each other. I created career development plans and helped them set their own SMART goals to show their professional progress in their work measurably. This kind of employee engagement and team building allowed us to acclimate quickly and collaborate effectively. As a team, our first task was to create our own DesignOps Team Playbook on how we operate, our principles, and the tools we use, and document other practices of how we each contribute to the overall success of the team, our office, and our partner.
After building our team, I proposed new services to our commonwealth partners, including content strategy audits and workshops, qualitative public research, accessibility auditing, and strategic design consulting.
The Pennsylvania Design Standards
Our ten-point plan also identified another need for our commonwealth partner: a shared design language for their digital services. As the landscape of services was developed in-house by the agency IT department and externally from various govtech service vendors, there was no cohesion between any service the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania except those built and maintained by our office. I had my team do an extraneous project in between projects to audit agency websites and services and compile a list of the most common UI components and patterns so that I could present a proposal to develop a design system for the Commonwealth. Our initial proposal was heard and kept as a potential future project.
That priority changed when data and feedback were shared with our partner that a commercial entity was taking advantage of a poorly designed and free service from our DMV website and charging individuals fees to essential process data for them. The public believed they were working with our DMV and not with a third party. This revelation spurred our partner to prioritize our design system work to prepare it for the Governor’s CX Transformation initiative in seventeen weeks.
My team and I scoped down the work that we initially estimated would be a 6 – 8 month to a 3-month endeavor while putting other work on hold. The cohesion I built with the team was tested in a high-stress, high-stakes environment. Ultimately, our team cohesion proved successful as we delivered a fledge design system with design tools (For Figma, Sketch, and other vector-based tooling), a complete UI kit using framework-agnostic HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and a fully documented reference site that includes usage rules and accessibility notes. We met our deadline, and our work was presented at Governor Wolf’s address in November 2019.
Outcomes
The success of ExpressForms led to other NIC offices and their partners adopting our product, with significant adoption in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Before our contract renewal, we had 5,000+ live ExpressForms, with 1,200 of them using NIC payment processing tooling in Pennsylvania alone.
The success of the Pennsylvania Design Standards (PDS) saw the court system and PennDOT adopt the PDS in their internal development and made significant contributions back to the design system for other commonwealth agencies to benefit from. Before Governor Wolf’s final term ended, his order to update all Commonwealth services to modern standards included a mandate to utilize the PDS in all public-facing digital services. The PDS was seen as a standout design system in the US government, with only a handful of other states having similar offerings and the US Web Design System being its only major comparable system from 2019 – 2022.
My work with our partner and building an experience design led me to consult with other NIC offices. I visited nine other offices and consulted with their partners on the value and ROI of experience design for their digital services. I helped charter and hire other NIC office design leaders from those consultations. My demonstrated leadership and domain expertise also invited me to several state summits to speak on accessibility, experience design, and content strategy.
Our Pennsylvania office eventually closed due to losing out on a new 10-year master contract, but my work did help us secure a two-year extension before a new RFP was issued. While we did lose the contract renewal, NIC Inc. was additionally acquired by a competitor, Tyler Technologies, that took all state office work in a different direction. However, the products my team and I developed at NIC Pennsylvania continue to be developed in-house in several states, and the PDS continues to guide the digital service development in Pennsylvania.
Team Credits
Experience Design Team:
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Tyler Noldon
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Jacob Crawford
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Jadrian Klinger
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Kristin Shelton
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Mercedees Wells
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Zoë Hall
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Chad Snyder
Leadership:
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Adam Thornton
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Christine Czachur
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Krystal Bonner