Human-Centered Design

The federal government authorized stimulus payments and the expanded Child Tax Credit to support American taxpayers through the COVID-19 pandemic. However, this could have denied benefits to the millions of low-income Americans who were not required to file taxes and who needed help the most.

On a single night in Austin, an average of 2,500 people experience homelessness. 60% of those individuals sleep in a place that is considered uninhabitable. While shelter is limited, individuals also choose to opt out of shelter for reasons like having to separate from partners or pets.

Millions of Michigan residents receive public assistance through the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS). Half of them tried to apply for and access these benefits online. However, the existing application was not mobile-friendly and it required more than 45 minutes to complete. This created delays and frustrating experiences for residents and agency staff.

The Missouri Department of Social Services (DSS) delivers public assistance to more than one million Missouri residents annually. Each benefit program has a different application, resulting in a combined 63 pages of application forms and case backlogs. Beneficiaries and caseworkers are overwhelmed by the complicated and confusing nature of this process.

Residents in poverty-affected communities like East Austin often face extensive barriers towards accessing healthcare and social services and lack fora for community engagement. The COVID-19 pandemic increased and contributed to many of these challenges.

When accessing the Office of Homelessness (OHS) prevention, diversion, and intake service, Philadelphians must go through many opaque steps and processes—often while in crisis or experiencing a traumatic event. Navigating confusing processes and paperwork can exacerbate feelings of distress or trauma. When delivering the service, staff also follow specific processes, offer information, and coordinate support while taking in difficult stories and daily stressors. These lived realities require adopting a trauma-informed approach to service delivery.

New York City's Administration for Child Services (ACS) coordinates prevention services with over 135 different programs and over 45 providers to help approximately 44,000 children annually live safely with their families. The existing process for connecting families with the agency does not account for their needs and opinions.

Participating in a research activity can be an intimidating experience, especially if the researcher is a government employee.

Despite New York's extensive service delivery infrastructure, people experiencing street homelessness in the city face many different and complex pathways towards finding stable housing. New York recognized a need to track these experiences to provide more direct, coordinated, and effective service delivery in the context of this broader journey.

The COVID-19 pandemic disproportionately harmed marginalized communities and heightened existing inequities. The NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (NYC Opportunity) wanted to work with non-profit organizations to empower community leaders to design more targeted and effective solutions for challenges in their communities.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government made gig workers countrywide eligible for unemployment benefits for the first time through the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) and Mixed Earners Unemployment Compensation (MEUC) programs. These benefits helped expand the social safety net during a time of crisis, but states were not equipped to quickly process the volume of applications they received. Overall, this strained state capacity and, especially early in the pandemic, increased avenues for fraud. Many eligible gig workers also struggled to provide the necessary income information, and income verification issues resulted in delayed or denied benefits for gig workers. State workforce agencies needed to find ways to efficiently make sense of and verify income from gig work, which can be generated from multiple sources at multiple times, sometimes even within the same day.

Find Local Help provides a list of free experts who can help users sign up for health insurance. The system asked additional questions before the results screen to give the backend system time to complete the search. Users received a “No Results” notification – instead of loading indicators – during this step.