Role	UX researcher
Duration	November to December 2020 (4 weeks)
Methods and tools	Figma, interviews, think-alouds, usability tests, heuristic analysis

To complete my Design Methods for Interactive Systems course at the University of Washington Information School, I collaborated with fellow students in my cohort to design an online version of an unemployment eligibility form intended to help Washington State residents estimate their likelihood of receiving financial assistance. We created this redesign in four weeks, working in week-long sprints. As the UX researcher of the team, I took point on interviewing target users, discovering the biggest changes people needed, and synthesizing those findings into design artifacts for the UX design team to implement in our prototypes.

Our first step was to compare our form with similar resources from different areas of the country. We compared the unemployment eligibility forms of other states, such as California and New York. When put side by side, we identified features and issues that were both common among all forms and specific to Washington’s form in particular.


Next, we interviewed people in our network who had applied for unemployment benefits about their experiences, hoping to identify ways which a resource like this could have aided them in the past. Due to the unique circumstances of the 2020-2021 school year, I personally was not able to reach users in Washington State, and opted instead to reach out to my network in other areas (I figure that the experience of applying for benefits is universal). Most of my interviewees expressed concerns about the specialized (and nebulous) language they encountered during the application process, and wished for ways to make information more accessible and apparent in an online version.


In order to help the design team implement these changes, we created an affinity diagram with our ideas for solving the issues that the interviewees brought up, personas that our design team would imagine using our product, and a storyboard that depicted a sample use case for our product.




Our research and design efforts culminated in a final high-fidelity prototype viewable here.

What I learned

Though I had a couple of UX design projects under my belt, I had never gone through an entire product cycle completely online, nor was I the sole researcher in a group before. Over the course of the project, I used various remote collaboration tools to facilitate the project, such as Miro and Figma. I also advised some of my group members who were totally unfamiliar with the UX design process. Finally, I learned to adapt my existing UX practices to a truly agile development schedule -- the project was at a real sprinting pace.