The Big Picture
As part of the process that starts when almost anyone in the five boroughs is arrested, the New York City Criminal Justice Agency (CJA) administers a questionnaire to assess the likelihood that the arrested individual will return for future court dates if released on their own cognizance. A judge reviews this assessment and makes a determination. In order to maintain fairness, this Release Assessment is continually updated with input from behavioral experts and relevant voices from the community.
In this most recent update, CJA’s goal was to also provide a brand new administrative web tool to help simplify the process for the employees delivering the assessment in the courts, their managers, and all the criminal justice personnel involved. I worked with the NYC Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DOITT), which was responsible for all technical aspects of this proposed new web tool.
My Role
I served as the primary UX/UI designer on this project, as part of a team of two. Using Human Centered Design principles, our goals were to accomplish the following:
-
determine what our users needed and wanted
-
reconcile our users’ needs with our stakeholders’ priorities through extensive wireframing
-
design and prototype the user interface
-
test early prototypes with real users
-
code an appropriate visual design in HTML/CSS and Angular 7
-
create documentation to aid the QA team in testing
The Process
The first thing we needed to do on this project was to understand how our users previously navigated this process, without a dedicated web interface. At the same time, we wanted to better understand what they wanted out of a brand new tool, and how we could build it in such a way that it was a real help to them, and not a new complication to their workflow.
I visited New York City courthouses in both Brooklyn and Manhattan as an observer to note how CJA employees conducted interviews with defendants and what they did afterwards. I came prepared with questions of my own for the employees to figure out what the pain points and highlights of their work day looked like.
It turned out that the process of conducting these interviews and putting together all the information a judge needs in order to make a determination involved constantly switching between several existing databases and applications to look up and verify defendant information. As a combination of training and peer-to-peer osmosis, most of our users had figured out a pretty solid workflow of desktop shortcuts and keyboard commands that let them switch between the applications they needed seamlessly.
After understanding the workflow without RA, we needed to understand how RA would fit into what people were already doing. We hosted a series of design workshops with the relevant parties from DOITT and CJA to get a sense of what their users expected, needed, and hoped for. These workshops were highly collaborative; providing a wealth of knowledge for us designers to start from.
We worked together to map out a service blueprint to understand both the “frontstage” and “backstage” of the whole process. We also began forming a shared vocabulary for the different actions of the RA system. CJA users had both legal and informal terms for the steps in their workflow. We began codifying some of these terms and making sure the application replicated the phrasing they were already using. Labels like "matched records", "unmatched records", and "score" thus made their way into the final application.
Taking more time for discovery up front allowed us to get a pretty robust list of user needs, wish list features, and potential product backlog items. We went into painstaking detail on both visual and interface designs with the relevant parties to make sure we weren’t missing anything. When it came time for production, I worked hand-in-hand with our amazing dev team in Angular 7; responsible for writing production-ready CSS and HTML and driving the overall design of the product.
Sample Documentation
Lessons Learned
This was the largest project I had been a part of during my time at DOITT. I led, or was involved, every step of the design process. I facilitated workshops and interviews, shadowed users, and led a collaboration on a service blueprint for a project of the utmost significance. As for the design itself, I was ultimately responsible for every part of the user interface. I wrote the HTML and CSS; using and customizing Google's Material Design where necessary. I also drafted and iterated over the content for every element on the interface, from column headings on tables, to labels for buttons, to the wording of error/success messages.
Getting to lead on a project of this scope was the biggest takeaway for me. The “stakeholders” we built the RA system for were both our users in the City government and the defendants themselves, who deserve every consideration that their information be recorded and used fairly, truthfully, and with complete transparency. I’d like to think the work we did played at least a small role in improving the City of New York’s criminal justice system.