inForm

Making benefit adoption easier

Website Design, Digital Government

2019

Featured in

Dubai Design Week 2019 - Global Grad Show
Harvard GSD Platform 11

Role

UX Flow | UX Engineering | User Research

Context

14-week studio project in a team of four

Visit Site

Github Repo

PROBLEM

Roughly 740,000 households in Massachusetts qualify for low-income benefits, but are not fully enrolled.

That equates to over $930,000,000 in unused benefits each month.

Applying to benefits is confusing and complex. The MA public benefits span some 20 websites and 126 pages. Users lack the motivation to find out how much they qualify for, not to mention application.

(Mass Legal Services, 2019)

(Nchako, 2018)

SOLUTION

What if, instead of navigating the tangled bureaucratic web of benefit organizations, the users could log into a single platform and receive a comprehensive benefit assessment in under 15 mins?

RESEARCH

We conducted 18 rounds of in-person stakeholder interview, shadowing and on-site observation to better understand the community we were designing for.

Places we visited included Boston Mayor Office, Economic Mobility Lab, food pantries, low-income community supports, public libraries, hospitals and more.

Stakeholder Landscape

Based on our stakeholder research, we decided inForm to be a website available on both desktops and smartphones, with shortcut to be featured in public library and public housing computer labs.

DESIGN:

Information

inForm includes the major seven Massachusetts benefits:

1. Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)

2. Healthy Incentives Program (HIP)

3. Massachusetts Low - Income Home Energy Assistance Program (MLIHEAP)

4. Massachusetts Rental Voucher Program(MRVP)

5. Massachusetts Earned Income Credit(MEITC)

6. Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children(TAFDC)

7. Women, Infants & Children(WIC)

We went through the application process of all seven benefits, and were able to narrow down the amount of screening questions significantly across benefits.