Howdy
I'm Mia!
I'm a Denver based UX designer passionate about research and service design. and writing. and food. sorry, what were we talking about?
I love to follow where my curiosity leads, and I believe curiosity's at the heart of good design. Let's take a trip down the rabbit hole, shall we?
curiouser
Role:
I was part of a team formed of 6 business analysts, working on upgrading a welfare eligibility and benefits determination system for the state of California. We all shared duties of mapping current and future business processes, facilitating workshops, conducting interviews and documenting pain points to incorporate into future implementation efforts.
Approach:
The task was to align and streamline how all 18 counties within CA support their county members. Previously, each county had vastly different processes, technology, and methods for serving their county members, leading to inefficient and inconsistent assistance across the state. The project approach to aligning the counties centered around business process reengineering:
- conducting desk research on county processes to create current state process maps
- facilitating workshops to validate current state process maps to accurately reflect processes
- interviewing county workers to understand and incorporate pain points and friction points into mapping
- creating baseline future state business process based on new system
- facilitating workshops to co-create future state business processes and streamline periphery systems
County workers from 10 different sub sections within the welfare eligibility office were invited to collaborate for in person working sessions, creating and validating 60+ business process maps per each county’s week long session.
Results:
While streamlining and aligning county processes was the main goal, counties also wanted to maintain aspects of their distinct processes; process maps therefore wound up tailored to each individual county. We highlighted these aspects from a change management and training perspective, as well as key functionality and areas of major change as part of the overall transition process. We handed off the process maps to implementation teams to tailor the new system to each county’s needs and ensure a smooth transition in order to minimally affect the residents of CA in need of the various support the counties provide (for example, ensuring no disruptions to SNAP/food stamps provisions). Furthermore, the counties benefitted not just from the exercise of walking through their processes, but also the documentation of it, as their own internal resource for process management and training staff.
Lessons Learned:
As my longest project to date, I learned a ton. Namely, how to learn, how to absorb all that I can even if I don’t immediately grasp it. In this sense, it felt like collecting puzzle pieces without knowing exactly what the overall puzzle looks like. And often, gathering those puzzle pieces was more a test of navigating people and conversations rather than maneuvering complex and convoluted information. Through it all, I realized I’ve got good vision, which I was able to flex on this project – zooming in and out from hyper detail focused to overarching process and back, and I thoroughly enjoyed the dynamic aspect of this type of thinking.
& curiouser
Role:
I was part of an HCD team of 8 designers and researchers, working to modernize a child support system for the state of Tennessee. We attempted to understand how the workers used the state mandated system and how it could be improved from a process standpoint, as we were limited in our capacity to make backend system changes.
Approach:
our process took an HCD centered approach:
- in person observations and documentation of child support workers engaging with the outdated system
- interviewing individuals and small groups
- synthesizing understanding of how the system fit into their daily lives through journey maps
- creating process maps highlighting blockers and system issues
Results:
The research outputs, such as the process maps, journey maps, and key insights were used as a baseline for creating a backlog of UI changes shaping future sprints. Our research also significantly furthered the team’s understanding of how and why the system had been failing the county workers, and laid the foundation for the project’s strategy moving forward.
Lessons Learned:
Listen to the outliers. I distinctly remember interviewing one woman who responded to one of my questions with, “I don’t know how to answer that because that’s not how I do things.” Her process differed than the norm, and as a result I spent much of my time on site unpacking her circular solution to a very linearly designed system. The linear design clearly didn’t reflect the many, many human complexities of working in the child support industry. That was the variable we actually needed to solve for, not just “modernizing” the system, but we didn’t uncover that gem of an insight until we dug deep into what the outliers had to say.
Ah look at that, right on time (read: slightly late), the end of our journey. If you’d like to continue, feel free to read the narrative versions of my above experience here.
cried alice!
What I discovered at the end of these rabbit holes: I love research. I studied cognitive science in undergrad, and it shows. I love it for the same reason why I love history, and writing, and studying language - I’m a storyteller. I think there’s something so satisfying about getting a host of information thrown your way, and being able to pick out important, often overlooked pieces, and shape them into something that the information-thrower might not have even known was contained in those pieces. And I love figuring out how to convey those insights in a way that makes sense to others why they matter at all, and helping carry that over into the actual designs that will circle back to the user who started it all.
Some lessons learned:
- People are funny. They’re also passionate about their domain… a listening ear is a most valuable skill to have at any given moment in my tool belt.
- Re-engineering business processes is important and impactful... but (!) without the human at the center, I kept returning to the question of who we were really helping. Were we hitting the mark? What even was the elusive mark?
- Not only do I enjoy pulling main insights from conversations, I’m also good at it. I love the feeling of piecing together bits of information that were offered up to me as plain rocks, but which actually hide gold nuggets inside.
- I work well real time. In person, on site, with the people actually using the system who know it inside and out. Nothing drives motivation to improve processes more than talking to and getting to know the people who it truly matters most to.
- Curiosity is at the heart of research - uncovering information, asking questions, circling back to the root of the issue, redefining the root of the issue, and on and on… and I’m nothing if not curious.
- The outliers are the most interesting. One edge case that others might be willing to ignore could actually be the corner piece, if you will, of the puzzle. Everything else should build off of those insights - why doesn’t the system work for them? What specifically are they doing to make it work for them?
- Conveying why insights are crucial is just as important as conducting the actual research - research is all good and interesting until it’s time to be integrated with design and implementation, and no picture has been painted about why it matters.
- Pushing back on limitations works, if you have the support to back it up. Learning how to stand up for what I saw in the field being at odds with our current/next sprint plans was huge. Finding the line between what’s ideal, feasible, and necessary also only aided in my understanding and communication of our research insights to the rest of the team.
if you must know...
I'm currently based in Denver, CO after starting with Deloitte in Washington, DC in February 2020. I graduated from the University of VA in 2019 with majors in Cognitive Science and Spanish. I'm originally from Atlanta (yes, Hotlanta) but am a Philly sports fan for life. Hope you've enjoyed reading through my website, which was coded with love! Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn if you want to continue down the rabbit hole.