CHILD SUPPORT CALCULATOR
CATEGORY
Service Design
CLIENT
State of Michigan
MY ROLE & SCOPE
Design & Research Co-Lead
Collaborated on cross-functional team
Impact across state of Michigan
Some prior and existing tools
ACTIVITY OVERVIEW
– Primary Research
– Empathy Interviews
– Service Blueprint
– Personas
– Interactive Prototype
– Joint Application Development
(JAD) Working Sessions
– Implementation
– Continued Support
OPPORTUNITY
The opacity between inputs and outputs to create a fair child support order was creating major challenges and tension between everyone involved with the process. A lot of the issues could be traced back to failings, or lack of, current tools for those gathering information and putting together the orders. There was plenty of room for improvement spanning from simple usability improvements, centralization of features into one tool, and most importantly calculation trasparency where possible.
APPROACH
As a team we took turns conducting inverviews, worked on making sense of the findings through a service blueprint and personas, and created an interactive prototype to get in front of our Joint Application Design group (JAD). The JAD was made up of folks who were currently working with parents and creating orders–they would be the user of the improved tool we delivered to their team. They were skeptical at first but we built trust and they were very engaged throughout the entire development process.
OUTCOME
We launched a new child support calculator that was easy to us and increased transparency through making sure state workers were able to clearly understand how inputs were impacting the calculation. This transparency ultimately helped them to better explain those details to parents who often demanded anwers. Also due to close collaboration with the client and the JAD, everyone felt that feedback had been well incorporated. The group even wanted to hire designers as work ended!
