ACLU Case Management System Design
American Civil Liberties Union x Harvard Tech for Social Good
Spring 2021
A brief origin story: after...
first learning about UI/UX design with my project Blossom with the HSA Bootcamp in January 2020,
taking a Human-Computer Interaction Georgia Tech course through edX in Fall 2020, and
helping design features for Datamatch's February 2021 release,
I was excited to see an application slip into my email inbox for the Spring 2021 semester: to apply as a UX Project Manager with Harvard's Tech for Social Good (T4SG).
Little did I know — I was chosen as 1 of 2 UX PMs for T4SG's inaugural semester of not just embarking on client projects centered on software/machine learning, but User Experience (UX) Design — the design of interactions that users would take with a product to truly address their needs. Keep reading to discover the magic that is UX ✨!
As former Project Manager of the American Civil Liberties Union case management platform design project, I'll be taking you through my whirlwind semester in which our team — myself, with two designers — collaborated with the ACLU, the most prominent civil rights organization in the United States.
💼 Find our full case study, designs, & research here!
The below descriptions are a SUPER abridged version of all our work, which contributed to a ~40 page report, prototype iterations, and more. This post will mostly reflect on my experiences as a PM and does include a baby summary of our work, but please check out these links for a full picture of the project!
Draft of the organization-facing blog post here!
🗺️ How did I get oriented as a PM?
I essentially had no idea what was in store for my fellow PM (Liya) and me. Since T4SG had never done UX projects before, we had full reins to shape the trajectory ourselves — and that's what we did!
So, in the week or two leading up to the start of our 12-week cycle, I took LinkedIn Learning crash courses in UX research & design and created our project roadmap (abridged version). The two of us started building Notion databases and Figma templates for competitor research, user research, information architecture, & more. Check out the Notion Database for ACLU Project!
Leading up to the official start, besides preparing the team-facing Notion and other prep work, I established a weekly meeting time with our project contact, the Chief Information Officer of the ACLU, called multiple ACLU stakeholders to get a sense for project scope & strategy (Director of National Security Project, Assistant to National Legal Director of the ACLU), and began to set up user interviews with ACLU paralegals and attorneys, which we had to do almost every two weeks.
So, Liya & I were innovating the process as we implemented it. Nevertheless, the expectations we set for ourselves, our client and team, and each other very much prepared us to meet challenges and deadlines as they came along. This included...
A strong weekly cadence
PM check-in with T4SG Directors
My team sync (Monday)
My client sync (Wednesday)
Sync with Liya to create Notion databases (weekend)
Create deliverables, set up user interviews, give feedback to designers (throughout)
Expectations
Splitting work with Liya to prep Figma/Notion templates
Strongly committed designers that did not miss deadlines or communicated when they needed expectations
Support of T4SG Directors when I had client communication issues and needed other leadership support
Clear Organization
Team Deliverable Tracker, Meeting Notes table (for team & client), new databases added as needed, Feature Tracker table, etc. (see the Notion database!)
🔎 How was the research process as a PM?
My initial timeline allotted about a third of the timeline into user research, which extended to about half the timeline. We definitely needed ample time to reflect on the data, and not just take design notes and record our user interviews.
We did some information catch up!
As a bit of "homework" for my designers and to make sure that we could chat with some baseline authority about civil rights and case management, I had them go through publicly available dockets of ongoing ACLU cases, look into basic civil rights vocabulary, conduct design critiques of existing case management platforms, and even look over documentation of some existing ACLU software that our client provided.
I did my best to schedule user interviews in advance.
Since we had to collect user insight every two weeks — for need-finding in the first 6 weeks or to get design feedback in the latter 6 weeks — I had to think ahead by emailing paralegals & attorneys and liaising with my designers to coordinate school and work availability to schedule about 10 calls — focusing on our two personas (paralegals, attorneys) with other stakeholders as well (directors, office managers).
I taught designers how to conduct thoughtful research.
We can only elicit honest feedback from users if we ask the right questions, and also if we stay silent and let them speak their minds! So, I taught the designers to not only write open-ended, non-judgmental questions and research scripts, but also so that their follow-up techniques allowed users to expand in a non-leading way. Check out our guide as a starting point!
I taught designers to summarize their insights after interviews.
After designers recorded near-verbatim what the ACLU staff had said, we summarized key points & quotes in the same document: split into behaviors, attitudes, pain points, goals, user attributes, and a 1-sentence summary. This helped us create user personas and our affinity map, and it helped us present a convincing case for our work to our client by consolidating primary source data.
I made time for affinity mapping & other summative activities!
When we showed our client our final digital affinity map on Figma with quotes about pain points from the ACLU staff members, it was the first time I heard our client very excited about the work that we had done! For our team, project-specific themes began to emerge — issues related to file organization, case development, collaboration, security, and more. Along with this, we used the Impact x Effort scale to thus prioritize specific pain points in ~3 levels (P0, P1, P2), and then rewrite each into a goal that a core feature would address.
🎨 How was the design process as a PM?
Now, for the fun part... design! After my designers each took on two core features of similar complexity, we engaged in three 2-week design sprints, moving from low and mid-fidelity designs to our high-fidelity ("hi-fi") prototype. Each sprint was one week of design, then one week of usability tests with ACLU staff to collect feedback and discuss improvements for our next sprint.
I created Information Architecture pages to track consistent storage of info in our ideal application.
My team soon realized that we could not plan the logic of our features separately if they all related to the same information. So, I impromptu-created a very large Information Architecture tracker that laid out all the fields corresponding to a certain UI screen or flow, making sure that other screens that touched that same bit of info had consistent fields across features. If that didn't make sense, one example is Andrew's case dashboard feature that displayed tags related to the current case — and these tags and subcategories had to match how Liz allowed people to search by tag in her search feature!
I prepped a lot of Figma components & variants in our component library.
Since our client cared more about the UX flow and logical structure than the UI aesthetics, we started from an existing design system! I prepped all of these in a separate file, consolidating variants (initially created as separate components), simplifying components and creating new ones. Pro-tip: name Figma components with subcategories using slashes, sign up your whole team for the Figma interactive beta, and read this for more complicated component organization!
I made design modifications & helped create non-feature-specific designs.
While I do think I could have narrowed the scope to offload work from our promised deliverables (since it isn't ideal for the PM to take on too much of the actual design work!), I assisted with some catch-all design components — for instance, our login page and menu bar that was persistent across screens.
I taught design concepts & Figma techniques as they came up!
Since I knew more about Figma components, variants, and transitions, I also helped my designers incorporate those into their great static designs, such as the minimizable time-tracker bar at the top of the screen! We also did not have dedicated time to just learn Figma, so I introduced new tricks throughout the timeline — starting with saving color palettes, drawing shapes, using helpful shortcuts — to making components and variants, adding simple animations, and the most fun part: prototyping and linking all the screens together by buttons or scrolling!
We had a clear design feedback intake (or archive) process.
Our designers quickly learned not just to collect design feedback in usability tests with ACLU staff, but also how to turn them into design improvements. Each design sprint had a Usability Report they filled out together, organizing feedback by feature and screen, which we went through together to sift through feedback to incorporate or keep aside. My team also had separate feature pages for them to organize their own notes in whatever way that would be helpful, which encouraged ownership over their own features. I would 110% recommend following this process: because conducting user interviews is only helpful if you can transform the raw insights into actionable steps!
🗝️ PM Key Learnings
Give and collect feedback consistently!
I made deliverables due a day before our weekly sync so I would have time to comment, or at least poke through, my team's work so I could 1) offer encouraging feedback and recognize their work, 2) offer constructive feedback to tweak their deliverable (could be a deliverable for next week), and 3) re-calibrate on whether my previous week's assignment of work was clear enough, and not too overwhelming, to potentially adjust future workload or the project timeline.
And, I set up a feedback form (optionally anonymous!) in the Start-Stop-Continue format, which I love for garnering positive and constructive feedback. If I were to do it again, I'd collect feedback more frequently and also less formally than having my team fill out the form at the midpoint and end of the semester.
Integrate design teaching throughout.
As mentioned before, I tried not to inundate my designers with Figma complexity. From the first week, I sprinkled Figma throughout our deliverables to make sure it wouldn't be intimidating when the actual design began. For instance, I had them fill out introductory profile cards about themselves, did a Figmadventure social, and had other deliverables within Figma (affinity mapping, persona cards, more)!
Since designers may not have Figma experience on top of being new to UX, make sure to transition them slowly but surely into the tool!
Establish an open & collaborative team culture.
One concept I learned in user research transformed how I check in on my team: instead of saying, "does anyone have questions?" I ask, "what questions do you have for me?"
It seems more intimidating to state "yes, I do have a question." And, a question presuming there are points of confusion allows newbies to ask questions more easily! It's always better to overly check if everyone is up to speed, rather than blazing through your meeting and having to answer questions over text after.
From day one, encourage asynchronous and synchronous collaboration. One thing I learned from interning at Slack is for designers to put ALL questions & discussions in the project channel rather than DMing the PM (unless it's a private matter). That way, other team members can also stay up to speed, pitch in on the conversation, and also be motivated by their teammates' dedication! It's also great visibility for the designer :)
One aspect I wish I did better on was encouraging collaboration without me as the linchpin of conversation. Having designers give feedback to each other, as deliverables, from the get-go (or even having them lead a design critique if they want to work on leadership!), could also help with getting designer buy-in into the project.
You sometimes need to make executive decisions!
When a project involves a client stakeholder, sometimes contrary user feedback, and also differing designer approaches, the PM might need to make a tough call instead of trying to satisfy everyone. For instance, I had to make some executive design decisions since my team did not have as much time to learn about UI/UX principles: whether that was the menu-bar design to centralize all our features, changing the color palette to be visually pleasing but not jarring, and changing how the search feature was designed (allowing for easier navigation of a robust search feature instead of prioritizing minimalist design).
🌉 Challenges Overcome
Learning to teach & motivate a team.
While I have had experiences in leading a team to build an experience (launching magazines with The Wave Asian Arts Magazine and creating a Tech Fellowship program with the Harvard Women Engineers Code Conference), this ACLU project felt like it had the most at stake — this is a national organization that safeguards our civil rights, guaranteed by the Constitution!
So, I was quite intimidated by this and the fact that so much of the semester was uncharted waters. I also knew I had to demonstrate confidence so my team would have faith in the project, which was initially tough as an introvert and over-preparer.
However, I learned that I could create an invested team culture: I established clear structure and expectations (ex: clear meeting agendas and deliverable notes, "deliverables" to reply to Slack discussions, message response times, extension request rules). This helped me lean into my PM role, but also made me realize that I did not have to pretend to be 100% confident all the time. I was also learning along with my team — so we were all on this crazy adventure together!
In addition to clear rules, making the team feel excited about the project and their MAJOR role in its success (to lead user interviews with ACLU staff, spearhead their own features, and interact with the client and major stakeholders) is what will keep them motivated, even when midterms and other obligations appear! Of course, I was also incredibly lucky to have such dedicated and detail-oriented designers that stayed focused throughout all 12 weeks.
Pivoting when we had scope or timeline changes.
One of my largest obstacles was when one of my designers had to leave the team. In similar cases, the PM should assume best intentions (mental well-being is always the most important, especially for students juggling classes and so much else!). At the same time, the PM should clarify expectations with the designer for off-boarding, and also communicate to the client ASAP about feature and scope changes. In the best case scenario, recruiting triple-vets the teams to make sure that, outside of extenuating circumstances, members aren't overcommitted from the beginning.
Moreover, some weeks were behind schedule, whether that was because of extra classwork or just a more-complex-than-expected deliverable that I assigned. I was never punitive — I 1) prioritized my designers as students and human beings with mental health needs first!, and 2) reflected on how we can adjust our timeline or simplify processes to be more reasonable based on team capacity (for instance, moving more directly into hi-fi without a separate mid-fi design template).
Communicating with a busy client!
Most of the T4SG clients are established nonprofits or other organizations in the social good space, from the ACLU, HRW, to the Clinton Foundation — in other words, they are SUPER busy. So, it was crucial to demonstrate our 110% commitment to the project, where our lack of experience could be made up for in our curiosity, dedication, and ambition. That can take form in a thoroughly planned meeting outline, thorough research, meeting slides, weekly client syncs, email update summaries, and sometimes — plain-old, incessant email bumps.
🏆 Favorite Wins
We received positive feedback from our client!
Our CIO mentioned that I was one of the best PMs he's ever worked with! And, that all the features would address the shortcomings of their current system setup, as well as the other case management options they explored previously.
We designed a system, in a new domain we had NO experience in before.
Looking back, I realized that we were a couple of college underclassmen that started from little to no knowledge about case management, the ACLU, nor UI/UX design. By the end, we...
had a complete understanding of the ACLU's current tech setup,
had an overarching understanding of case structures, statuses, and organization,
designed an ideal system to organize these complex objects to better encourage personal tracking, collaboration, and cross-organization searching,
chatted with ACLU legal staff pushing forward these civil rights cases to learn how to best assist their work,
listed out the best next steps for handoff and further research the ACLU should undertake!
I led an awesome project that could help expedite civil rights litigation, deepened my confidence in UX: and helped my designers learn a lot!
One of my personal wins was spearheading a complete and successful UX product, as well as creating an entire Notion database system to track a complex design project. And, since I study Computer Science and Ethnicity, Migration & Rights, and also have a lot of humanities-oriented interests (especially creative writing and language!), I feel right at home with UX and human-computer-interaction-related fields. I am thrilled to have applied these interests to creating impact with the ACLU.
I am also proud of myself for teaching my designers — not just how to use Figma, but how to approach creating technology with a user-focused and social-good-oriented mindset. Both designers are now taking off with leadership positions in tech initiatives, and I'm so excited for them to apply what they have learned to create mindful and ethical technology.
TLDR: what was being an inaugural UX PM like?
Like I described in my opening, Spring 2021 was a whirlwind. it sometimes felt like I was living day-by-day as I collaborated with Liya to set up our next design process and deliverables each week. However, those three months were so transformative: I have gained immeasurable experience and confidence in my leadership, management, and product skills, from the design itself to feature prioritization.
Now, with this design & management experience in my back pocket, as well as my recent software engineering internship at Slack, I would be more than excited (and ready!) to consolidate my insights to plan, execute, and lead another technical product or feature towards success!
Most importantly, I am so grateful to have met so many people along the way: whether that is my amazing designers, similarly passionate techies in T4SG, to the inspirational ACLU paralegals and attorneys fighting for our civil rights.
⏭️ What's next?
Liya and I, the inaugural UX Project Managers, are now Co-Directors of UX and are preparing new client projects and project frameworks for Fall 2021, all based on our learnings from the past semester (like this super long post)! I am looking forward to supporting our incoming PMs and designers, and helping build the UX design infrastructure for future generations of T4SG ❤️