The Challenge
My San Jose is the City of San Jose’s 311 reporting app. The City enlisted our help to understand whether non-English speaking residents were (1) using the My San Jose app, and (2) how to increase their engagement of the app to ensure that the City’s resources were being distributed equitably.
What We Did
My partner, content designer Nira Datta, and I practiced both generative and evaluative user research to inform the City’s direction on designing inclusive digital services. Our work was supported by a partnership between the City and Code for America.
The Result
I co-wrote an official report that helped guide the City’s direction on designing digital services for monolingual Spanish- and Vietnamese-speaking residents of San Jose.
An overview of our seven major findings:
Simplicity and usability are as important as language.
Always provide an option to remain anonymous.
Website experience is as important as the mobile app.
Phone calls will always be a relevant touchpoint.
More outreach is needed to increase awareness of My San Jose.
Improvements should address the needs of the elderly and those living with disability
Even if all barriers were removed, some residents may not feel inclined to report issues via My San Jose.
Our approach followed industry best practice
We collected information about our user’s needs, built a product to meet those needs, measured its success, and iterated in order to make better decisions more quickly.
We conducted 19 in-person interviews with our target users: non-English-speaking residents of San Jose.
During the discovery phase, many interviewees were intercepted at a neighborhood flea market
We relied on Spanish and Vietnamese translators for the interviews with monolingual residents. Our Spanish translator is featured on the right.
Based on those findings, we built & tested prototypes of the MSJ app with with ten target users.
We tested Simplified English version against the existing app in Spanish and Vietnamese.
The existing app translated into Spanish with a human translator. We asked users to submit an abandoned vehicle request and this is their ideal path.
The Simplified English version of the app. This is the ideal path for a user submitting an abandoned vehicle request.
To our surprise, our target users preferred reporting an abandoned vehicle through the Simplified English version of the app over the existing app translated into their native language.
In parallel, we interviewed 16 city staff members from various City dept’s for contextual understanding of our target users’ pain points.
We also gained a better understanding of the challenges faced by MSJ internal service staff.