Helping vulnerable workers learn about and exercise their rights with worker.gov beta
Organization: White House Presidential Innovation Fellows
Role: UX/UI design, user research, copywriting
Design Challenge
The Department of Labor, the Department of Justice, the National Labor Review Board, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission asked my Presidential Innovation Fellows team to build the beta version of a platform for vulnerable workers to learn about and exercise their rights in two months. Challenge accepted!
Design Response
My team started with research and discovery. My role was to coordinate and conduct phone interviews with workers who are most commonly exploited in the United States, including factory workers, day laborers, and at-home carers.
I also spoke with advocates and organizers who assist workers who have been subject to exploitation at worker’s centers across the country.
We used our findings from the user interviews to facilitate co-design workshops with our agency partners, starting with card sorting and other UX activities designed to support our content strategy and information architecture.
Then we spent a lot of time holed up in a room at 1800 F Street figuring out how this thing could work and fast.
Results
The general idea we developed was to create a guided digital experience instead of an informational site that required a lot of searching on the user's part.
That's what gave us the original "mad libs" design on the wireframe homepage that was later simplified. As users navigate through the site to learn about their rights, we set clear expectations for what they could expect from the claims filing process.
Additionally, because we learned many workers are hesitant to take action due to fear of retribution, we added stories about workers who had successfully exercised their rights and had positive resolutions, explaining what the process looked like for them.
The beta site featured a limited number of worker profiles, focusing on workers who were most frequently exploited in the United States. We also developed a distribution strategy that leveraged worker centers around the country who could use this platform to help the workers in their communities.
After going live, the beta site was used to capture feedback in usability tests, and improvements were made during the next design phase after our time as PIFs had ended.
