“DC.Gov reached out to us to create a better, more engaging experience for their DMV customers. As we all know, completing tasks at the DMV can be a cumbersome activity. We started this project by asking “how could we make the DMV more enjoyable, rewarding even?””
Problem
The DC DMV needs a way to better engage with people in order to improve their reputation.
DC residents who use the DMV need a simpler way to increase the accuracy of a first search to find relevant information to complete common tasks.
My Role
User Research
Competitive Analysis
Storyboarding
Wireframing
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Solution
We believe that by creating a personalized profile, an intuitive global navigation bar, and by incentivizing completing tasks with rewards, people will have a better experience. In turn, the DMV will earn a better reputation over time
Tools
•Balsamiq
•Axure RP
Time
2 and a half weeks in a 3 person team
THE PROCESS
1. Research
Interviews
We conducted a screener survey with 45 participants.
why
Determine which potential users would best fit the profile and select 15 people to conduct face to face interviews. Our goals were to understand the challenges potential users faced when they were trying to complete a task related with the DMV.
We concluded that the users:
•The DMV has a reputation of being a slow-moving, frustrating process, so people prefer to complete tasks online. However, they’re finding that using the website is also cumbersome because of the amount of steps
•The DMV is impersonal and lacks customer service
•Their navigation is not intuitive so finding relevant information is difficult
2. Synthesize Research
Why
Affinity mapping and card sorting
Affinity mapping helped us to identify the most common challenges for users to complete a task.
Card sorting helped us to build the structure for the website, decide what to put on the homepage and label categories and navigation.
Through affinity mapping and card sorting, the tasks people reported trying to complete the most at the DMV fall into 3 categories, this determined our global navigation
•License/ID
•Vehicle
•Tickets
Affinity Mapping and card sorting conducted by Laura Rincon and Alice Pan
Why
Competitive analysis
Determine common features and gain a better insight of what the final product should include to stand out from our competition.
We also conducted competitive analysis with DMV websites from Maryland, Northern Virginia, New York, and California
why
Secondary competitive analysis
Learn best practices from other industries and identify features that we could implement in the website
We look at companies such as Google, Capital One, and Chipotle to better understand how make specific features in our website. Specifically, we looked at Google’s autofill features, Capital One’s forms, and Chipotle’s reward program.
•We studied Google’s UI for their autofill features for inspiration
•We looked at how Capital One set up their forms and were able to make them concise. We also looked at how they condensed text and made it into a question mark you can hover over to get more information.
•We studied Chipotle’s rewards program to better understand how they kept their users engaged and coming back for more.
WHY
Storyboard
To tell a story that everyone could see and relate to.
Sometimes people who works for the government is not open to new ideas. We wanted to create something that captures audience’s attention and make our solution memorable for them.
3. Sketching and low fidelity prototype
why
Sketching
In order to brainstorm the layout of our product
We sketched out wireframes with different layouts and shapes
WHY
Low fidelity prototype
Test out how it would flow by clicking through our prototype. and evaluate the new experience. It helped us to make changes and adjusts based on what we heard from people.
After sketching we produced a low fidelity prototype
WHY
Usability testing
Understand how our product would perform in the real world, here’s what we found:
We conducted usability with 5 participants
WHY
USER FLOW
The User flow helped us to focus on the experience and needs of the user. It gave us an overall picture to create a more seamless user experience.
4. Prototype
People who interacted with the prototype received positively the changes.
“Good job! With the profile, DMV also can notify users about drive licenses’ expiration days. This looks very clean and easy to navigate”
Prototype video
