211Maine

Abstract

A look into the new experience architected and designed for 211Maine, a resource directory for those in crisis or need in the state of Maine. Completed within the span of a quarter, the goal was to provide an updated design that allowed for easier navigation of the directory, improved search results, and an improved homepage concept that highlighted the services directory navigator. 211Maine also requested the new experience remain within bounds of the brand's pre-existent design style & guidelines.

Role

• UX Designer - Responsible for user research, regularly interfacing with the client & respective stakeholders, user experience design & subsequent workflows. My role was not responsible for the visual design.

Stakeholder Interviews (3 Participants)

When we started this project, it was a desire from the stakeholders at 211Maine to remain as close as possible to the development. There were several interviews that happened over the course of a month that aided in a deeper understanding of 211Maine as a helpline service and an online directory. The stakeholders we spoke to ranged from a help line operator to several key stakeholders of the organization. The most important takeaway from these interviews was how incredibly important it was that we, as the design team, ensure that the designs we create are highly empathetic, use encouraging and positive copy, and are optimized for users who may not have regular access to the internet or a cell phone. There were several considerations brought up in these interviews that dictated both technical and user centric considerations, including an offline mode, a deep dive into how caching would work or the loading speed for slower internet connections.

One stakeholder noted:

"The people who use our helpline are possibly at one of the lowest points, if not the lowest point, in their lives. We do not want their experience to be more difficult than it already is. We're in this industry to help people, and we want to build a tool that can help as many people as possible. We want it to work as predicted and return the resources that are needed."

This very deeply resonated with me, and remained heavy on my heart throughout the design process. This sentiment from one of our stakeholders is what drove every decision we made during the design & development process.

Anonymous Interview (1 Participant)

We were also lucky during our research process to speak to an anonymous participant who 211Maine had helped in the past. This participant had originally reached out via phone to the helpline and was redirected to the service directory for more information on resources available to them. They had discussed how difficult it had been to accurately find a service near them, or one that suited their needs (i.e. needing a ride to and from a certain location in order to receive the help). While they had felt supported by the personnel helping them via hotline, they were discouraged by the difficulty of locating a resource provider that was genuinely close by and not 100 miles away.

Considerations

TECHNICAL CONSTRAINTS

Going into this project, there were several key considerations from both a design and technical perspective. The agreement was to create an experience that could be iframed into the current 211Maine website, utilizing Drupal as a backend content management system. Right off the bat, the current experience had the following issues:

• Not returning the correct results on keyword / zip search
• Not returning results relevant to the user geolocationally
• Poor taxonomy structure with little documentation as to how items were classified within the directory structure
• Confusing directory experience
• Lack of clarity around where a user needed to go to find contact information
• Inconsistent subpage layout resulting in irrelevant resources (i.e. a resource with no phone or email)

Evidenced from above, there was a significant amount of tech debt and rework that rolled into this project as well; with the design heavily dependent on the revised taxonomy structure. A chicken or the egg problem, design and development went back and forth on which item to tackle first (try to create the architecture around the perfect design, or create the design around the architecture). There was also a significant amount of work put into location mapping with the directory, as the current directory had associated zip codes but no way to organize these results via radial distance. This compounded with the need to gut the taxonomy structure put a tremendous strain on design resources as engineering swallowed much of the project budget.

USER EXPERIENCE

From a user experience perspective, there were dozens of categories that we needed to accommodate in a user friendly manner, while also accommodating free text search (keyword + zip) as well. We also needed to make a design that accommodated numerous other filters post-submission, and a subpage template that would fit every single resource 211Maine had to offer. This meant deeply understanding the data around the subpage & search results in order to create a design that could best handle any combination of the data.

Gutting the Taxonomy

Working as the liaison between development and the client, design worked closely with engineering to ensure that the new taxonomy mapped to keywords that made sense to the user, the organization, and to any developers who would be looking at the documentation post implementation. Throughout this process, we discovered terms incorrectly categorized, parent categories inaccurately named, verbiage that could be perceived by a user as offensive, and over 200+ keywords to map. Working with 211Maine, we made sure that all areas of need had a corresponding child 'situation' that could be queried as part of the parent category or independently.

Organizing the Data

Once the taxonomy structure had been revised, we understood how we were going to lay out the data on the home page, but the subpages and directory were still pending. Working with development, we created a list of all data fields associated with directory results & the subpages, and were able to create different wireframes for situations where pages may be missing critical data. We also worked with the client to ensure all the desired additional filters were incorporated on the search results page, like forms of payment / insurance accepted.

Low Fidelity

When creating the wireframes, one thing that I felt would be particularly helpful would be the ability to quickly visualize items near a person as that was one of the key complaints from the original experience. I also wanted the subcategories to be easily visible / changed if needed because a person might not know that what they're looking for is available without seeing the subcategories.

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Final Wireframes

We landed on a side by side layout for the homepage as it is easily collapsible on mobile while retaining the hierarchy of information, even in its reduced state. For the directory, we felt it was important to keep the map visualization available at all times as a user may want to browse by result OR location. On the home page we also changed the category titles to say the following: "I need [x]" and for the subcategory "I need [resources/help] for [xyz]". We felt this was an approachable way to list areas of potential concern for a user who may be in crisis.

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Final Thoughts

Overall, this is probably one of my favorite projects I have done to date as a user experience designer. I think as a UX designer, there is no better way to positively impact the widest audience of users than to work in the public sector or with public sector clients. This project, while not necessarily challenging from a design perspective, provided challenge in a myriad of different ways, including discussing tradeoffs with the developer and client, actively exercising empathy, and dealing with prior tech debt and limitations.