IDEMIA’s Front Office application is a customer service application used by agents at the Department of Motor Vehicle to renew and issue new licenses. After detailed analysis of the existing system, I was able to cut the number of steps in half, a huge win for an organization that puts a premium on speed and accuracy.
Understand
USERS
Through site visits and interviews, I was able to understand the agents who work at the DMV. People that genuinely wanted to do a good job, they were chronically understaffed and overworked. In addition, like most people in customer service roles, they were frequently dealing with annoyed customers.
Speed, so they could get through the queue as quickly as possible, and ease of use were at a premium.
AS IS
I mapped out the As Is of our current product and discovered that there were numerous steps, some of which struck me as repetitive. For example, after taking an applicant’s photo, the agent was required to confirm that it was a good photo even though the system automatically validated the quality. Observations revealed that agents rarely, if ever, overrode the system. So, why have that additional step.
This pattern of asking the user to repeatedly confirm information that the system identified as valid was repeated throughout the application.
Design and Iterate
TO BE
I introduced the concept of automatically moving forward if the system validated a photo or other information. This immediately reduced the number of steps, and the cognitive load, on the agent.
In addition, the pages were redesigned so that actions which had been located inconsistently throughout the existing UI were located near the actual item that was being acted on, clearly defining the relationship between the action and the information.
