Our second year zoomed in on New Jersey, our other partner state in the initial year. We again delivered a corpus of research and artifacts for their continued use, helped their internal design system team, created an even more honed Figma prototype, and a customized intake form that we helped launch at two pilot sites in the state. We handed off the remaining integration work to our fellow Digital Services Coalition member Nava.
Our impact
In philosophy and in practice, Truss is a fiercely Agile development firm. So in response to the problems NJDOL was experiencing, it was obvious implementing agile methodology meant redefining processes that were tightly coupled with legacy systems. For NJDOL, we delivered value in three critical areas:
🏗️ Infrastructure / Platform - Truss delivered results that are adaptable, scalable, resilient, and secure; built for today and for the future.
➰ Agile Business Process - Truss delivered results that are collaborative, flexible, and efficient in response to dynamic situations and claimant needs.
📄 Claimant Intake Application - Truss delivered results that are modern, flexible, and extendable; built with a high level of test coverage to enshrine intended behavior.
US DOL publicized a snapshot of our initial and NJ-specific work on Github to be used as an example and reference to other states who want to modernize their UI infrastructure. However, we and NJ DOL both suggest future work be done fully in the open from the start. Being transparent and fostering open-source collaboration allows the community to share lessons learned and decisions made to reduce rework and repeating mistakes.
This openness is a key facet of our equity-centered approach to our work. This is evident in our co-design process and regular usability testing with actual claimants, advocacy organizations, and frontline DOL workers, which allowed us to quickly approve and integrate—and plan for future—improvements to the claim process. Multiple participants using screen readers found our work to be highly accessible and excel among other form-oriented applications, and our final report to the US DOL on user experience has been lauded within the department as their standard for future work. Follow our blog to learn more about how we achieved this:
Modernizing unemployment insurance
Continuous development and decision records
Feedback loops and refinements
Return on investment for users
Detailed UX metrics
How does this story resonate with you? Are your claimants stuck with a slow, out-of-date process when it comes to accessing their money? Truss can help. Please let us know what questions you have. We’d be happy to jump on a quick call and open up the conversation.