When this project began, we already provided a free basic intake forms for social service providers to gather information. The set up process took weeks of back-and-forth between the service provider and our staff, followed by a significant configuration lag. During that lag, a large percentage of service providers were dropping off, so the plan was to build a self-serve set-up tool.
I did interviews and contextual analysis with several service providers (both those who adopted and those who dropped off). I discovered key unmet user needs that totally altered the course of the project: users weren’t dropping off because the lag, they were dropping off because our forms functionality wasn’t robust enough to meet their program’s intake needs.
My findings showed that adding a self-serve tool wouldn’t be enough to increase adoption. The project would be a failure, unless it was paired with an overhaul of our entire intake form functionality. I advocated for building dashboards and automation to help agencies triage the most in-need submission, automatically highlighted the submissions that best fit their program’s eligibility requirements, and provided alternate resources to those who weren’t eligible.
I had to tell a very compelling story to drive alignment around some of the more controversial features. I presented my findings to leadership and used quotes from our users to tell the story, and got buy-in at the leadership level to expand the project.