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  • Paid Family and Medical Leave

    Real world training for Customer Care Specialists

  • Challenge

    Screenshot of Washington healthplanfinder. Two health plans are listed as potential matches for user, listing estimated costs and expenses.

    State benefits

    Paid Family and Medical Leave is a new benefit program for Washington workers. Benefits are available for serious health conditions that prevent working, time needed to care for a family member, bond with a new child or spend time with a family member preparing for military service overseas.

    Poster of affinity diagramming completed by Anthro-Tech and WAHBE. Sticky notes are clustered around themes "Best of class", "Feedback/thoughts" and "Current website".

    Pre-launch training

    Anthro-Tech worked with Paid Family and Medical Leave (PFML) to conduct real world scenario training for the Customer Care Team (CCT). We conducted a pre-launch usability study of the benefits application process - both digital and paper - to identify and prioritize usability issues to be fixed pre- and post-PFML program launch.

  • Solution

    During the project, my team led following efforts to:

    • Evaluate the usability of creating a SecureAccess Washington account, which is needed to access the Paid Family and Medical Leave portal
    • Evaluate the usability of both paper and digital application for benefits 
    • Assess the helpfulness of customer care specialists' responses to user questions
    • Create an "issue tracker" with specific study findings, including issue severity and representative quotes 
    • Recommend best practices for making the application process more user friendly 
       

    Key takeaways included:

    • User need for clarity in language and instructions within patient and family guide - many customer care specialist calls were placed during users when parsing through information in this guide 
    • User need for clarity during handoff from SecureAcess Washington to PFML is jarring, because there is no explanation of how SAW and PFML are related
    • User need for explanation and steps for which documents need to be uploaded in order to submit the application 
    • User need for weekly claim questions in plain talk, especially when the customer care specialists verbalize the weekly claim questions over the phone 

     

  • My role

    As the lead UX researcher at Anthro-Tech for the real world training project, I designed, developed and conducted an in-person usability study for participants. I analyzed the data and worked closely with supporting researchers to recommend data-driven solutions and recommendations focused on user-centered design principles.

    1

    Design and develop research plan

    Plan based on critical user journeys when signing up and applying for Paid Family and Medical Leave benefits, as well as submitting a weekly claim

    2

    Conduct in-person usability study

    Led 10 participants through application process, connecting them with a customer care specialist in real time to simulate real life customer inquiries

    3

    Analyze data and create recommendations

    Recommended data-driven solutions focused on user-centered design principles

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