Truss vastly improved the claimant experience for unemployment insurance (UI) and improved the ability for both the New Jersey and U.S. Departments of Labor (DOL) to respond to claimants’ changing needs. In the process, we set the conditions to reduce operational overhead: fewer agent interventions, a much more serviceable technical platform, and the organizational capacity to manage and evolve the system when Truss has signed off.
Working shoulder to shoulder with the USDOL, the challenge was to develop IT solutions to modernize antiquated state technology by centrally developing open, modular technology solutions that can be adopted by states as needed. Then, our challenge in the second year was to directly assist New Jersey to identify process improvements that can speed benefit delivery, address equity, and fight fraud.
Our work with the NJDOL/USDOL began with many common problems that are associated with antiquated systems:
The claim process experience was slow, clunky, and unreliable. Multiply that pain by the 430,254 claims submitted in 2022, or even worse in 2020 when the pandemic led to 2,041,115 claims that year!
Prior attempts to respond to the situation had fallen short and caused further discouragement. They needed a clear path to manage this key aspect of providing billions of dollars in benefits each year.
The agency was dealing with increasingly unhappy claimants and spiraling staff impact (cost / morale). An adequate solution was seemingly out of reach.
Our initial year focused on the USDOL’s attempt to create a one-size-fits-all approach. In this, we delivered a research corpus (summarized in a set of service blueprints), a comprehensive prototype in Figma for multiple touchpoints, and a well-tested coded prototype of the UI intake form. We also helped our partner state Arkansas set up Login.gov for their UI portal.
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.
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:
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.
