Making Systems Less Sticky

If you wanted to turn a legacy system into a more people-centered public service, where would you even begin? In New Jersey, the unemployment insurance system was supported by decades-old technology and had slowly been patched and modified to meet new rules and regulations. But when the state saw a spike in unemployment insurance claims during the COVID-19 pandemic, it took that crisis and turned it into an opportunity to adopt a new way of working that put people first. But where to start? 

Gillian Gutierrez, the director of the New Jersey Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization, worked with the New Jersey Office of Innovation to focus the team’s work on “making sticking points less sticky.” In other words, the two offices wanted to identify where claimants were getting stuck applying and where caseworkers were getting stuck while processing applications and incrementally improve those experiences. 

To put this strategy into action, the team, with the support of the governor and departmental leadership, first needed to understand exactly where these sticking points were happening for both claimants and staff.

finding the sticky spots

One way the team found where users and staff were getting stuck was by going to an existing data source: call center data. They combined both quantitative data on the volume of calls on specific topics and qualitative data from call center representatives about frequent and difficult issues. 

One issue they found became what Civilla calls a “key domino”—a challenge where a tightly scoped intervention can have a disproportionate impact on improving service delivery. The unprecedented fraud brought on by the pandemic forced states to integrate never-before-used digital identity tools, making one of New Jersey’s key dominoes identity verification. Claimants had to prove they were who they said they were, but many didn’t know this was a requirement or were confused about the process to get verified. For call center staff, identity verification was a stand-out issue because of the volume of calls they received and the external process the claimants had to complete.

"Regardless of what percentage of calls were about identity verification, imagine it was 25%, it felt like 80% to the call center staff. That was because this was an issue that they could not solve. They could not verify someone on the phone; it had to be done through the outside vendor. So the weight of the problem was both very heavy on the people calling in and on the call center staff,” Gutierrez said. 

making a sticky challenge smoother

To solve the identity verification problem, New Jersey took a number of steps to increase trust, confidence, and clarity. 

An outside vendor was hosting the identity verification page, so users were sent to a different URL with a different visual design to complete this step. That shift in experience can cause confusion and decrease trust, which can lead some users to drop out of the process or make errors in their submission. Best practices from places like the U.S. Web Design System encourage government agencies to “promote continuity” in their user experience. To do that, New Jersey moved the identity verification process to a New Jersey Department of Labor URL to create a seamless, consistent experience. 

Then, the team turned its attention to error messaging. 

“For a long time, the error message folks received was the same, regardless if the error was that their benefit year had expired or they needed to complete identity verification,” Gutierrez said. “Our error message couldn’t point them towards how to self-heal.“

The Office of Innovation improved how the team gathered data so they could separate these two groups and create custom, plain-language error messages for each group. That allowed applicants to better understand why they’d hit a roadblock and know the next step to continue in the process. 

To avoid users ever hitting that error page, the team also added clearer instructions, in both English and Spanish, at the end of the unemployment insurance application. The new language told users that even though their application was done, they still needed to complete identity verification to move forward. 

All of these little tweaks across infrastructure, data, content, and UX design added up to substantial changes. After this project, New Jersey saw a 65% decrease in the number of calls about identity verification. In addition, New Jersey saw a 20% increase in the proportion of claimants immediately taking the next right step (verifying their identity) after submitting their application for benefits.

catalyzing change through user research

With identity verification improvements underway, the team turned its attention to the appeals process—another part of the application journey where user experience could make a meaningful difference. 

In New Jersey, if you apply for unemployment insurance benefits and are denied, you have the opportunity to file an appeal and appear before a tribunal to argue your case. The vast majority of people choose to represent themselves in this appeal process, even though they may not have much knowledge of the unemployment insurance system outside of their own history. 

New Jersey had a legal requirement to publish unemployment insurance appeal decisions, but the state wanted to see if it could publish them in a way that helped claimants navigate this process. The state wanted to see if they could show people similar cases to their own to help them prepare for a hearing and decide whether to appeal or not. They began with user research with people who had previously filed appeals. 

“One of the women who was recorded in the interviews was very clear. She said something like, ‘This is amazing. I really could have used this tool when I was preparing for my own hearing,’” Gutierrez said. “Having that woman's recording, a real human voice saying that this tool would have made me feel more confident representing myself, is a very powerful moment for government leaders.”

Gutierrez used that first-hand story to build the case with other New Jersey leaders for how to design the tool to provide transparency and support to claimants. 

“In government work, sometimes you need that constant reminder of the human that's on the other end, just to help you push those boulders up the mountains,” Gutierrez said. “Because it's not easy, it's not glamorous, but the more you can have those little reminders from human research of how important the work is, the easier it is to bring everyone together and keep the product moving forward.” 

Through user research led by the Office of Innovation, the team was able to determine what information would be helpful to claimants and how to best present that information so it was clear and actionable. Internally, user research sessions helped build momentum to turn a legal requirement into a human-centered feature that offered support during the process, helped claimants build better appeals, and improved trust. 

starting and sustaining change

In government, change work can be both difficult to start and difficult to maintain over the long haul. In New Jersey, leaders found the opportunity and motivation to prioritize challenges like identity verification in a time of crisis. 

“The pandemic sort of gave us an opening, as terrible as it was, to think about this unemployment insurance technology and process in a different way,” Gutierrez said. “We didn't have to implement a complete system from any single vendor. We could imagine building it together with our staff, one piece at a time, in a more flexible, resilient way.”

Sustaining that momentum required Gutierrez and the team to work with New Jersey staff across departments to build buy-in and ownership. 

“I 100% believe that it's the staff of the agency that makes this reimagination work. They have been putting gum and duct tape around the system for decades. They're the same ones who are going to make this work for NJ’s unemployed workers,” Gutierrez said.

At Civilla, we have also seen how creating durable change requires engaging deeply with staff. As Civilla gets to the implementation phase of our projects, we often use “train the trainer” models that empower frontline staff to learn about new systems or processes and train their peers on how to adopt them. This builds engagement and understanding and is a piece of how we help agencies build internal capacity for continued change.

If successful, this type of project can seed larger transformation within institutions toward a more people-centered way of developing, administering, and improving public services.

"Hopefully, NJ workers are proud of the work their government is doing to transform its residents’ experience with safety net programs," Gutierrez said. “In the end, you're asking the agency to be the owner of this and to have assumed all of these ways of working: the way of procuring, this way of hiring, the way of building. The goal, in a sense, is to create the New Jersey version of that ethos, where human-centered design and iterative improvements are just the way that unemployment insurance is done, or that is the way that any state program is built or recreated.” 

Learn more about New Jersey’s ongoing work to improve the unemployment insurance experience for residents. 

The New Jersey Department of Labor & Office of Innovation's participation in this interview does not constitute endorsement of this organization, its products, or any other products, services, or enterprises discussed during this interview.