UX
UI
Research
Service Design
Measures for Justice is a nonpartisan nonprofit that seeks to improve the U.S. criminal justice system by creating tools that promote transparency, accessibility, and data-driven decisions for institutions and their communities.
What is the Wayfinder?
The Wayfinder is a questionnaire that help government agencies assess their data practices and infrastructure. After completion, we provide a report summarizing strengths, challenges, and a list of recommendations for improvement.
The Wayfinder is a questionnaire that help government agencies assess their data practices and infrastructure. After completion, we provide a report summarizing strengths, challenges, and a list of recommendations for improvement.
Challenges
The MVP questionnaire existed as an unwieldly Google Form. This platform struggled to handle its large number of questions and offered limited layout options.
Because Google is not CJIS compliant, some offices could not access the questionnaire at all and had to fill it out as a PDF, which was a frustrating experience.
We did not have a standardized process for guiding agencies through the Wayfinder experience, which creates inefficiencies and inconsistencies. As a result, it takes us too long to process a Wayfinder and scale effectively.
Results
decrease in
user onboarding time
decrease in
user completion time
User Interviews
I interviewed three agencies that most recently completed a Wayfinder in the last year. My goals for these interviews were to:
Learn about the user experience during the Wayfinder process and identify any pain points or confusion.
Assess how successfully agencies implemented our recommendations.
Understand the value agencies gain from completing a Wayfinder.
Identify any general data issues from the agencies' perspective.
The Wayfinder is time-intensive and difficult to complete.
The questionnaire used unclear wording that created confusion. Since it included data questions spanning multiple roles and functions, agencies had to coordinate with various staff members and hold multiple meetings to complete it. Users specifically called out the data fields identification section as particularly challenging and time-consuming.
Agencies do not have the capacity to implement majority of recommendations.
Agencies generally focused on recommendations that would have the biggest impact or were quick and easy to implement. They do not have the resources to carry out every recommendation in their report.
The report was easy to understand.
All the agencies thought the report was clear and nobody had any issues with the report’s wording or layout.
Mapping our workflow challenges
To gain insight into Measures for Justice's internal workflow challenges with Wayfinder processing, I conducted stakeholder interviews and reviewed existing documentation. Using this information, I created a service blueprint to visualize the complex process, which was not fully understood even by many employees within the organization. The service blueprint helped to:
Map out the fragmented workflow
Identify time-consuming and resource-intensive steps
Highlight areas for potential improvement
The key pain points we observed were:
Resource-Intensive User Support: We spend a lot of time on meetings with agencies to help them troubleshoot Wayfinder questions or answer any clarifying questions.
Challenges in Estimating Capacity: We don’t have a very good idea of how long each step take because we don’t have a standardized process and it varies widely, which makes it hard for us to estimate our capacity and plan for the future.
Unclear Roles and Communication Issues: Many MFJ employees are in contact with the agency, which creates confusion about who is responsible for what. This leads to overlapping responsibilities and inconsistent task assignments.
Lengthy Contracting Process: This issue falls outside the product team's purview. Feedback was escalated to leadership for consideration.
These insights helped focus our efforts on areas within our control and highlighted opportunities for improvement in user experience and internal processes.
Feature prioritization for V1
After conducting user research, we defined Wayfinder V1's scope with a launch target of late January 2025. During the stakeholder and user interviews, I collected a comprehensive features wishlist.
To prioritize these features effectively, the product manager, engineer, and I used an impact-effort matrix. This collaborative approach ensured we could make data-driven decisions about Wayfinder V1's feature set, focusing on delivering maximum user value within our development constraints. Our main goal was to identify the highest impact items and determine which of the highest effort items could wait for V2.
Based on our prioritization efforts, we focused on the following key areas for Wayfinder V1:
Web App Migration: Transitioning the questionnaire from Google Forms to a dedicated web application. This represented our most significant effort but also promised the highest impact.
Questionnaire Optimization: Refining question wording and reducing the overall number of questions where feasible.
Process Automation: Implementing automation to significantly increase scalability. Our goal was to at least triple the number of Wayfinders processed in the coming year.
Enhanced User Guidance: Designing more intuitive guidance within the questionnaire to assist users in answering questions accurately while reducing the need for external support. We wanted to focus especially on sections that users had previously identified as challenging.
These priorities were carefully selected to maximize user experience, improve efficiency, and support our ambitious growth targets for the Wayfinder.
Solution
Since the design is simple and mainly involves form fields, and we already had a design system in place, I opted to skip wireframing and go directly to high-fidelity designs.
Given the questionnaire's complexity and potential time commitment, I designed the interface to be as straightforward and efficient as possible, prioritizing user ease and speed.
Questionnaire Rewording
While developing Wayfinder V1's new designs, I collaborated with the researchers to eliminate duplicate questions and refine the questionnaire's language and structure, aiming to improve clarity.
Internal Admin Tool
I worked with our frontend engineer to build an internal admin tool that would enable the Wayfinder processing team to manage agency profiles, user accounts, and registration links in one simple interface.
Usability Testing
To validate the new ideas I came up with for Wayfinder V1, I created a condensed version of the questionnaire for testing which included a list of predetermined tasks around:
Account creation
Navigation to the questionnaire
Fewer sections with a small sample of questions within each section, focusing on those that users historically found challenging
This approach allowed me to test the new wording and guidance without overwhelming participants with the full-length questionnaire. The test group was split evenly between users who had completed the old Wayfinder and those who hadn't, providing a balanced perspective on the improvements.
Design Changes
Before
After
Users can contact us for assistance with specific questions directly from the questionnaire. Initially, a circled question mark icon was chosen for this function. However, due to its visual similarity to an existing tooltip icon, users became confused during testing. To resolve this, the icon was changed to an email symbol.
Before
After
Initially, I placed the autosave indicator below the floating navigation, but users often overlooked it. I repositioned the indicator next to the progress bar, improving its visibility and establishing a clearer connection between the autosave status and the progress of ongoing tasks.
Users were unsure whether the progress bar represented the completion of the section or the entire questionnaire. To clarify, I added the percentage next to the corresponding section in the floating navigation, making it clear that the progress bar tracked the current section's completion.
Before
After
To further enhance clarity, I introduced a legend during the onboarding process that explains the contact us icon and autosave indicator and what they meant.
Final Prototype
Next Steps
Prep for launch and conduct user acceptance testing (UAT) of the web app in the dev environment to ensure design specs are implemented accurately - Completed ✅
Prioritize and improve other workflow challenges to better estimate capacity - In Progress 🔵
Add community engagement questions - Not Started ⚪
Onboard 25 agencies to the new Wayfinder experience - Not Started ⚪