COVID brought a number of unique challenges in its wake, stressing critical points in the systems we rely on. Unemployment insurance systems were hit hard in every state, at levels never before seen.
Rhode Island's Unemployment portal was pushed harder than ever been before at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We were given the task of redesigning the portal from the bottom up in order to lighten the load on their call centers.
To accomplish this goal, our team set out design a style guide to handoff to our development partners and create consistency with the client's existing website. We conducted research with local UI users, and set about creating a useful and helpful process to make the unemployed's lives a bit easier.
Beyond the sheer number of new applicants, there was also significant rise in fraudulent claims. Rhode Island's Rhode Island's Department of Labor and Training approached our team with the intention to build back better, and make their portal more usable and friendly with design thinking.
To create a succesful product, we needed to understand how we could fix the issues in the current unemployment system in the most effective and efficient way possible. To accomplish this, our team conducted user and stakeholder interviews, and polled users on twitter to develop a set of requirements for the minimum viable product.
We learned that our core goals were to reduce call volumes, greater user feedback, and remove various pain points. The team created iterated through series of sketches, low-fidelity wireframes, through ultimately delivering full prototypes. I was responsible during this process for creating and managing the team’s design system, as well as contributing to individual modules.
Together with our development partners, our team helped reimagine a 20 year old unemployment platform, resulting in reduced wait times and reduced fraudulent claim rates. With the release or our platform, and a chatbot the team designed, call volumes were significantly reduced. RIDLT loves what we were able to deliver, and is still working closely with Wongdoody teams to iterate on the success of the MVP.