2021.2-2021.5 Team of 4 with a PM and two programmers
Redesign the violation system that is used by 500+ food safety personals daily in schools around the New York City to be more modern, responsive and user friendly.
User research report
Desktop dashboard redesign prototype
Mobile responsive design solution
Before Redesign
After Redesign
Managing over 1700 schools in New York City, the Department of Education(DOE) performs period inspections to schools' cafeterias regularly with the Department of Health(DOH), in order to maintain a good and healthy learning environment for students in NYC. During a typical period inspection, the inspector will inspect the space and write down the violations, then import them to the DOH violation system — which will assign those violations to the schools to be resolved.
https://whimsical.com/doh-process-ShTTk46KZDkPJVR1Ftz94a
To revamp its antiquated violation system that dates back to 20 years ago, the IT department of DOE hired me as their UX researcher/designer to discover the problems, renew the look and feel of the current system. I worked closely with one product manager, two developers, and a UX team who act as outsider resources for me when I needed.
I started my journey of understanding the users by reading through the documentations of the system, which are mostly written by developers to specify the access for different kinds of users. At the same time, I played around in the system, and asked a lot of questions when I had a chance in the demo session with the product manager.
I soon realized, with four kinds of users in the system, there are a lot of stories and scenarios to cover, even when I am just playing around the system. So I invited my team to do a "As a … I want to ... so that..." exercise with me, in order to find out as many users stories and their goals while using the DOH violation system.
At the end of the exercise, we managed to get 8 most important user stories, and we managed to narrow the user categories from four into two based on their needs/goals.
With the clear stories in mind, I then go back to the system to document what are the current user flows like, while users are completing the tasks in their scenarios. After which I conducted a heuristic analysis to document what are the problems are causing the most troubles, on a scale of 1-5 (1 as poorest and 5 as best) .
https://whimsical.com/doh-violation-system-user-flow-Tq556eqCi3za4AwqFQf5x7