How do we make Unemployment weekly claims filing process simpler?

We began with organizational/domain research about the unemployment process in Washington and a few other states. We used this information to develop screeners that helped us identify 14 potential interview subjects. This allowed us to conduct six interviews about people’s experience filing for unemployment in Washington State, and one contextual inquiry watching a subject fill out the job search log paperwork. This data became a wall-sprawling affinity diagram, which would become the basis for the development of our pr0to-persona, Dave.

Because we had a limited data-set, we were only able to develop a proto-persona. Our proto-persona, Dave is in his late 40s. He lives in Seattle with his wife and young daughter. He cares about putting money in his daughter’s college fund, which is difficult right now because Dave was recently let go from his job and has been filing for unemployment benefits.

To understand Dave’s needs and struggles better, we created scenarios for him in which his life could be improved by the MoJo app. This helped us understand Dave’s mindset, needs, pain points and wants during the sketching phase.

We then sketched out ideas for the app, iterated and sketched more. At one point we had whiteboarded three entire classroom walls. This led to the development of a paper prototype, which we were able to test with three users. The biggest issue the tests revealed was that MoJo had potential labeling problem. Unless you were already familiar with the unemployment filing process, the calls to action weren’t entirely clear. We resolved this issue by clarifying as much of the language as possible, and adding the development of an on-boarding experience to our next steps.