Status: In progress (Aug 2024) / Role: Lead UX Researcher
Faster!!
Crisis Text Line partners with 988, the national suicide and crisis hotline, and takes a portion of their users. Because of this partnership, we have a contractual obligation to meet certain requirements. Our clinical team transitioned to a new safety assessment model from a fairly linear, straightforward one, to a much more complex one to meet industry standards. Due to the change, our product's average speed of answer (ASA) increased significantly, pushing us out of the range agreed upon with 988. It was all-hands on deck to find opportunities that could reduce our ASA.
Through ongoing observations, the team documented a variety of inefficient workflows that caused a trickle-down effect on speed; if a supervisor was slow to support a responder, that responder would take more time to get through the conversation and take another one. In a collaborative brainstorm session, we mapped out those workflows to a user problem and proposed a few solutions that might help out.
On the contrary, the team also did a range of secondary research via our Community and saw a high volume of responders complaining about how challenging implementing the new safety assessment model was.
The main feedback from responders was:
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More seasoned/experienced responders stopped volunteer because they were unable to adopt the new safety assessment model; they were so familiar with the old safety assessment model that they found it too challenging to move away from it.
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Responders lost their confidence in taking conversations and were slower to progress through them because they weren't familiar with the new safety assessment mode.
Research for this initiative consisted of:
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Contextual inquiries - observing supervisors and responders during a shift provided insight into how they implemented the new safety assessment
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Surveys - getting supervisor input on proposed changes to a Legacy platform and how it could impact their workflow