Record Review Study
How might we better support government staff throughout the
record review process?
Context:
UX Researcher @ Granicus
Contributions:
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Aligned stakeholders
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Authored research plan
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Recruited participants
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Conducted research methods
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Analyzed data
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Presented insights
Problem Space
GovQA is a Granicus product that supports government staff in managing public records requests.
A competitor introduced new capabilities related to record review, raising concerns that the changes could affect GovQA’s competitive position and lead to lost business. To assess the potential risk and proactively identify opportunities to improve GovQA's record review experience, I conducted a research study to understand how government staff review records in response to public records requests.
Methodology
Mixed Methods
Mixed methods employs the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Specifically, exploratory sequential design, where qualitative data collection happens first followed by quantitative data collection, was used.
Methods
Journey Map Interviews
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What: One-hour interviews based on participant-generated journey maps of their typical record review process for complex requests.
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Why: To learn what the public record review process looks like end-to-end and where pain points exist within that process.
Competitive Product Analysis
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What: A review of products competitive to that of Granicus' GovQA product.
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Why: To understand the differentiators that influence users' decision to incorporate or exclude a product from their process.
Secondary Research
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What: Analyzed support tickets and feature enhancement requests.
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Why: To gain a broader, more nuanced understanding of user wants, needs, and pain points.
Survey
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What: Survey of how desirable an accelerator, an alternate method for accomplishing a frequent action in a user interface, is relative to other proposed accelerators (1).
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Why: To be able to prioritize new accelerators in feature development.
Insights
Record review can be a complicated process that, as one participant described, "[involves] a lot of moving parts." Before this study, the record review process had never been visualized. As a result, stakeholders lacked common ground and insight. To give stakeholders can artifact to align around, an interactive flow diagram was used to capture the Record Review study insights. (A flattened version of the flow diagram can be found below.)
A few of the key insights included:
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Accelerators could be especially beneficial in the record review process, as steps like redacting are repetitious. So much so, that one participant described their stream of consciousness while redacting as such: "Well, this is hell on Earth: going cross-eyed reviewing, marking, and applying redactions with a mouse." Eight actions were identified as being able to be made more efficient with accelerators.
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The changes to competitive product offerings, which were feared to potentially harm sales, were found to be mostly hype. In general, the offerings weren't more abundant or particularly novel. Rather, the competitive product offerings were just being marketed well.
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Across the record review process, when system errors occurred, whether because of a known limitation or a bug, the system failed to make it clear to users that something had gone wrong and why. This violated usability heuristics one (visibility of system status) and nine (help users recognize, diagnose, and recover from errors).
Outcomes
The research found that the new competitive offerings did not pose a meaningful threat to GovQA, allowing the product team to deprioritize record review as a major roadmap initiative and redirect resources toward other opportunities. The insights informed one smaller, targeted concept for the coming year’s product development roadmap focused on incremental improvements to the existing experience, including expanding accelerators such as bulk actions.