EDD Re-design

The Employment Development Department (EDD) offers a wide variety of services such as Unemployment Insurance, jobs, and training, etc. Our user utilizes the EDD website because she lost her job due to COVID-19. She uses this government agency to access her unemployment insurance benefit every other week.

View Prototype

My Role

Research, UI Designer

Collaborate with another student to conduct user research, and to design an improved user interface for web.

Time Frame: Three Weeks
Tools Used: Figma, Miro, InVision, Adobe XD, Webflow

Project

Improve the usability of the California EDD website

The solution

Redesign the website by integrating new UI components to provide users better experience to use the website. Our goal was to improve the usability for users by streamlining navigation and decluttering content.

The Challenge

Layouts:

Confusing layouts and lots of unnecessary steps to login each time.

Content:

The EDD website displays too much information when users are trying to discover right information about the clams that they are looking for.

To start our user research, we conducted two Zoom interviews, in which we had a user to try to find eligibility for opening a new case and try to log-in on EDD website. This helped us discover usability issues and pain points.

Wireflow

On this flow you can see the steps that users should take to login to Benefit Program Online. While we understand this is for security reasons, it (frustrate user to log-in each time) takes the user a long time to login.

Sitemap card sorting

User #1

User #2

New Sitemap

Phase 1: We created a new sitemap based on our users card sorting for the main navigation.

Phase 2: After phase 1, we decided to eliminate the Benefits & Fraud from the main navigation to make it easier and less overwhelming for the users.

User Persona

Since we have gathered a bunch of knowledge of the audience, as well as their goals and needs, we use the user persona to represent key audience segments. It helps us focus on tackling the most important problems – to address the major needs of the most important user groups.

Let’s meet Cindy Marks, a Sales Associate in Bay Area. She lost her job due to Pandemic, now she has to use EDD website for the first time to be able to get her benefits.

A & B Testing

Before we moving to our low fidelity wireframing, we created 2 different version of main page only to run 5 sec test to see which one is easier to use for users. One of the best feature that original EDD website has is Translation option in the footer. Based off our research we found out that 41.2% of Californians are not English speakers. That is why we decided to bring the Translation to Utility section to be more accessible to all the users who use EDD.ca.gov.

Version A: In this version we kept the original EDD navigation bar. The main changes that we made was, we added Multilingual Resources & Home to the Utility section. Also, moved the Log in next to the Navigation bar to be more accessible and the rest of page is similar information as the original website.

Version B: In this version we used the data that we gathered from our card sorting. We tried to make this version simple and easy to use for our users but still keep all the necessary informations. We want a website which is more navigable for all users.