Implementing a life-event service delivery model in the redesign of NY.gov

I led the design and user research for the redesign of NY.gov, implementing a life-event–based service delivery model to improve service findability, accessibility, and usability for 20 million New Yorkers.

Context

Many people interact with various levels of government during some of the most stressful and vulnerable times of their lives.

NY.gov serves as an entry point to New York State services and information. People who use NY.gov needs vary greatly as what they aim to do includes:

• applying for food assistance
• looking up information about healthcare
• getting help after experiencing a natural disaster
• accessing housing and financial assistance programs

Any of these interactions can be overwhelming for families, individuals, and communities even on their best days.

Despite the importance of the site to people and communities across New York, it had not undergone a comprehensive redesign since 2015. Each state agency manages their own services, websites, and digital infrastructure, resulting in a fragmented experience for users.

Monthly feedback submissions and accessibility audits consistently revealed the same problems:

• users could not easily find the services they needed
• search results were often irrelevant or confusing
• many pages failed WCAG accessibility standards
• government terminology was difficult for users to understand

I was hired at the very start of this project and led the user research, strategy, and workshopping sessions. I introduced a life-event based service approach to reimagine how people use the website, aiming to group services by life events to help individuals who are navigating often complex and traumatic events or changes.

Below is a short quote describing the power of life-event service delivery, from an article titled How government can deliver streamlined life event experiences

Instead of forcing individuals to track down different government agencies in response to a life event such as a birth or death, these agencies collaborate to meet citizen needs proactively. This can mean anticipating citizens’ needs, sharing information on the citizen’s behalf, and guiding them through their likely next steps.

My goal of this work was to make access to state services easier and the experience of using NY.gov less stressful and mitigate any harm.

This is a picture of what NY.gov looked like before our redesign.

Plan

I engaged with more than 20 New York State agencies to understand their primary services and user populations. I facilitated a workshop in which agencies listed their top services, how their agencies serve the public, and the main user groups of their agencies. I also sent surveys to each agency to collect information about their services. Through stakeholder workshops and collaboration sessions, we mapped out a plan forward in how we will reimagine NY.gov.

Collect

User research was an essential cornerstone of this project. We wanted to understand holistically how people who are navigating complex life events use NY.gov and what we can do to better support people with care.

We began to use analytics to understand the top services on NY.gov, as well as the top services for all New York State agency websites. This process was very meticulous, but we wanted to ensure that in our redesign, we weren't leaving any major service area out. We collected all of this data and developed simple site maps for each agency to guide us forward.

We used UserTesting for our research. I developed a survey we could send out to a general population of New Yorkers to measure the experience of NY.gov before any redesign and to start to uncover what problems exist.

We found that:

• 56.8% of respondents did not find NY.gov trustworthy
• 41% of respondents did not find NY.gov to feel modern
• 43% of respondents did not find NY.gov to be well-organized
• 49% of respondents did not find NY.gov to be accessible

We then set out to facilitate user interviews. We sought to understand how individuals navigating complex life events and changes use New York State services, identify where we can help them find what they need, and learn about services that could support them.

We focused on people going through one of these life events:

• becoming an adult
• early parenthood
• navigating a chronic or sudden illness
• approaching retirement

We found that most people we interviewed had a tough time finding information about these life events using the current navigation.

“It's a little frustrating, you gave me a task, I can't even complete it. I work tech, like, that's my job, right?”

“I would probably go towards this agency website where I'd learn more about this. I feel like this is where I'm supposed to be, but at the same time, I'm not sure.”

“Services and programs are almost synonymous, in my mind. These two words, when I think of government are too nebulous for me to distinguish them without actually looking at them.”

“I would get information, I just felt like it was just shooting me from one site to the next, and I was just like, are these even connected?”

Through our interviews, we identified these major themes:

• people going through life events faced immense stress and anxiety and were often making huge decisions based on the information they had
• while navigating through NY.gov, most users did not know the difference between a service and a program
• the handover from NY.gov to partner agency websites was confusing and not clear to most users
• services often fit in multiple categories, making it confusing for users to know where to go
• people felt more supported when they were able to speak to a real person

We found that overall, 11 out of 12 users could not complete information-seeking tasks successfully. These tasks were related to finding information about child care, support for retirement, finding short-term disability programs, and finding out what student loan aid options the state provides.

After sharing our findings with our team, we set out with a good base to start to develop information architecture and a site map that better reflects how people navigate through the website, and start to develop life event pages.

I developed a plan for our card sorting. One huge challenge was with so many services on our website (2,000+) how do we card sort information meaningfully?

We decided to conduct the card sorting activity in two rounds. I wanted first to understand how people group the top 100 services on NY.gov and how they’re naming each service group. So, I conducted a round with an unmoderated open card sort first with 20 participants. Then, once people identified major service groups and named them, I conducted a second round of card sorting using a hybrid approach. I used the top 3-5 services each NYS agency identified as the basis for the cards for this round to uncover any gaps in topic areas and potential service grouping.

After analyzing the results of both rounds, we began to create groupings of services that made sense for people and developed a few site maps.

We then used tree testing to decide on which global navigation to go with. We developed a few site maps, ranging from all the services centralized under a “Services” page to decentralizing services under “Living” “Working and business,” and “Visiting” to understand which global navigation would make it easier for people to find the services and information they need.

Design

After sharing our research with the team and creating a site map we felt good about, we engaged with 2 of our visual designers to start to develop prototypes for what a reimagined NY.gov might look like. Over time, the previous version of NY.gov had accumulated a large number of unique components and layouts, which created visual inconsistency and made pages difficult to scan. We had design sessions where we prototyped different ideas, specifically focusing on implementing:

• improved navigation centered around a site map that makes sense for users and includes a section for life events
• standardized page structures and reducing the number of components used across the site
• creating new pages centered around key life events, so those navigating these events can access and discover services to help them
• for each service page, designing more feedforward so users are aware when they select certain buttons, they will be taken to an agency website
• implementing a Get help page to support people who need immediate assistance or need information on how to contact a New York State agency

Impact

We are currently in the process of launching the redesign and are working with our engineering team to plan out its implementation. From our initial usability testing, we found that overall, users were able to find information they needed more easily, it was a more cohesive experience, and users felt more supported in navigating complex life experiences and events.