California Child Welfare Indicators Project

Designing an information portal to facilitate child welfare system improvement

Client: California Child Welfare Indicators Project (CCWIP) for UC Berkeley INFO 290: Product Design Studio

My role: User Researcher & Designer (1 out of 3)

Timeline: 5 weeks (Fall 2022)

Stakeholders: UCCWIP program directors and engineering lead, California Department of Social Services officials

Methods Used: Comparative Analysis, User Interviews, Figma

Task: Create an information portal for California officials to view key child welfare performance indicators and access resources to prepare for CFSR Round 4.

Background

California Child Welfare Indicators Project is a collaborative project between the University of California, Berkeley and the California Department of Social Services dedicated to providing capacity building, technical assistance, and data to state social services officials. Every five years, the Department of Social Services undergoes the Child & Family Services Review (CFSR), a process for monitoring child welfare programs at the state level. This review process determines how states are performing against federal requirements and indicators that measure positive outcomes like safety, permanency, stability, and well-being. This process happens between state and federal staff; however, states often need to work with their county counterparts to ensure they are meeting these requirements and indicators. In 2023, the fourth round of the CFSR will kick off.

The Challenge

In order to prepare their users for the fourth round of the CFSR as well as cater to other user groups such as the general public, CCWIP wanted to host a portal that could serve as a landing page for users to visualize seven key performance indicators, understand how each California county performs on each indicator against the state and the national standards, and access capacity building resources to help social services officials prepare for the CFSR—all in a way that could be easily digestible and clear. In addition to the above, CCWIP also wanted a way to extract data, charts, and graphs related to the performance indicators. And finally, CCWIP wanted a deliverable that could blend easily with their existing site design.

The Target Users

Our target users are officials within the California Department of Social Services who prepare for and gather data for Round 4 of the Child and Family Services Review. They are diverse in their age, education, and most importantly, tech and statistical literacy.

User Goals

Based on the above profile of our target users, we created the following user goals:

  • To visualize national, state, and county performance data for each of the seven child welfare indicators

  • To understand whether a county or the state is performing better or worse than the standards for each indicator set at the national level

  • To extract data, charts, tables, and other resources and incorporate them into projects, presentations, reports, and other related activities

User Research

During this process, we focused more of our efforts on designing and prototyping; however in order to compensate for less budgeted time towards user research, we decided to employ the following methods:

  • utilize our existing stakeholders—our client— and interviewed a few employees, where we asked questions about the feedback they’ve received from users and about their own experiences and institutional knowledge, both at the organization as well as from their time as social workers

  • run a semi-structured interview with a Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Analyst/Program Manager, an industry expert who had experience leading teams (comprised of our target users) through the CFSR process for their county

  • conduct a comparative analysis of various dashboard-driven sites to understand common elements (e.g. WHO Covid-19 dashboard)

Our Design Solution

Our goal for designing this prototype is to create a portal with a user-friendly interface that provides support on how to use and interpret CCWIP’s data. In our solution, we created the following:

  • a main portal home that showcases a navigation menu and data visualizations for the key child welfare indicators with a feature for users to be able to pull up their county’s corresponding performance data

  • pages containing technical documentation, such as the Technical Bulletin and the Systemic Factors

  • a page for the Guiding Questions for System Improvement, organized based on each key child welfare indicator

Please feel free to explore the Figma prototype below!

My Roles

I have had experience working with clients on research-related projects; however, this was my first time designing a high-fidelity prototype for a client. My roles were as follows:

  • completed comparative analysis on various types of dashboard and data visualization-based products

  • served as the primary point of contact between our team and the client

  • organized interviews with the client as well as a target user to better understand user needs and pain points

  • designed multiple low-fidelity wireframes for the dashboard

  • designed overall site navigation

  • created and designed sub-pages such as:

    • the “Explore report data” pages for each statewide data indicator

    • the “Systemic Factors” page

    • the home page or the “Statewide Data Indicators” page

  • added all prototype interactions

  • standardized all design choices and formatting throughout the prototype

  • prepared the content and materials for the final client presentation

Reflections

  • Given that our target users (state social workers) were sometimes inaccessible in addition to the short project duration, we did not have the resources to carry out a more robust UX research process. So, we had to be creative and utilized our client’s institutional knowledge to help us better understand our target users. If I were to revisit this project, I would like to have carried out more interviews with not only social workers (and not just those based in California) but also with adjacent users that might share similar characteristics, such as limited tech and statistical literacy.

  • Though we carried out our client’s primary objectives, we would have loved to spend more time evaluating the accessibility of the overall portal. For example, the initial user feedback we were able to collect indicated a desire to better understand whether or not a county was on track against each indicator and against the state. We utilized visual cues to illustrate this; however, our choices of color (red vs. green) may not be the most accessible to all populations, and we could have validated this through additional usability testing. In our client presentation and in a future iteration, we advised either exploring other color options or additional cues to indicate whether a county was on track.

  • This project taught me to empathize with users—especially those that may not have an extensive amount of knowledge in data, statistics, or even navigating a dashboard. Though there was a lot of information that the client needed to showcase to their users, a key learning for me from this process would be to better prioritize that information. At the moment, we have included all of the necessary information about the CFSR process for users, but I would want to carry out user testing to ensure that all of the information presented is not overwhelming or daunting.

Special shout-out to my teammates!