kweisuxdesign
Service & Website Design - Student Project Spring 2024
Sponsor: Landon Young (MIC founder, CASA Volunteer)
Primary Roles: Project Lead, UX Designer (leadership & project planning, research, UI design)
A Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) is a trained community volunteer who advocates for abused and neglected children in the child welfare system. Out of the 390,000 children in the foster care system, 242,000 are represented by CASA volunteers annually. While this is a lot of children being represented, this also leaves over 148,000 children left without a voice in the court system.
(National CASA/GAL Association for Children, 2024)
'MIC: Giving Children a Voice' aims to increase the amount of cases some CASA volunteers are able to take on at a time by being a resource that organizes case information in one place as well as help with the clerical responsibilities of volunteers. By doing this, CASA volunteers will be able to spend more time with the child they are helping and will potentially have the time to help another foster child. CASA staff would also be able to share case-related documents directly through this website.
Mission
My team's mission with this project is to help reduce the workload and mental stress of report-writing and other clerical tasks for CASA volunteers. Our main goal with this is to improve the organization of information, including the contact information of related stakeholders, meeting information with stakeholders, and documents related to the cases.
nationalcasagal.org
Website Design
For this project, our task was to use a previous semester's worth of research to guide our decisions for a website that functions as an extra resource for CASA volunteers. Of the pain points found from user interviews, research, and walkthroughs of current CASA tools and processes, a lack of organization of all related people and materials stood out to us as a major issue. Because of this, we prioritized creating pages for managing documents, managing stakeholders, and a calendar to plan meetings. All three of these topics are vital to the responsibilities that CASA volunteers have.
In addition to the user research from the previous semester's team, we did our own secondary research, comparative analysis, and user interviews in addition to several round of user testing with CASA volunteers and other UX designers.
Homepage
We wanted the homepage to show CASA volunteers the information that is the most relevant to them based on the case(s) they are working on. The specific tasks and information related to each case is included in the tab selected at the top of the page. The widgets within each case include reminders (an editable to-do list and reminders for scheduled meetings) as well as desired case information (documents and recent contacts). The navigation bar also has an icon for reminders related to newly shared content from CASA staff and Court Report due dates.
This page also allows the CASA volunteer to access general information about the child they are helping.through a collapsible menu.
Documents Page
The documents page has sections relating to different types of documents that CASA volunteers need access to. This includes documents like personal notes about meetings and child visits. There is also a section for submitted court reports and training documents in case CASAs need to revisit them. There is also a section for drafts, which can then be submitted as a court report or kept as a document.
When a document is selected, the CASA can then highlight text and make personal notes about the text that can be viewed later. Our sponsor was also very interested in implementing an AI assistant that would be able to summarize document information, however our team does not have prior experience with AI so we left that feature a bit vague.
From the documents page, the user is also able to create a new draft or upload a document from an external source.
Contacts Page
The main purpose of the contacts page is to provide general information about those related to the child's case, contact information for them, and case-related widgets for meetings and related documents. Each section includes various information about each topic, such as participants, date and time, and meeting notes in the meeting history section. This page also has alerts for next meetings and missing information within a section.
Each case also has its own drop down menu that includes those related to the case and a way to differentiate between them visually by changing the color to indicate things such as closeness to the child being helped or urgency with scheduling a meeting.
Calendar Page
The calendar page is a pretty standard calendar with a focus on meetings related to each case. If the CASA volunteer has multiple cases, they have the ability to color code them so the alerts look different from each other. The opacity of the meeting is also lowered once a meeting has passed. Additionally, the calendar page has two views: a week view that shows each hour, and an event view. One or the other can be chosen for personal preference.
There are also pop-out menus for each meeting and case that shows information relating to them.
