Kicking off during the final stages of the related Texas work, Benefind (since renamed Kynect Benefits) turned out to be a perfect opportunity to put our Modes & Mindsets framework to the test. Where Texas was discovery and strategy, Kentucky would be pure delivery.
(If you haven't skimmed the integrated eligibility overview or part one of this series, those may help to provide a bit more context here.)
Like Your Texas Benefits, Kentucky's Benefind was an integrated eligibility (IE) system — a low income benefits application and management tool built by Deloitte in the early 2000s. It was not mobile responsive — it was, in fact, intentionally blocked from mobile browsers due to known limitations — and Deloitte account leads sought to both modernize it and move it onto a Salesforce platform.
A contract had been offered and a verbal agreement provided from the client, but in the run up to the gubernatorial election, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services (CHFS) had frozen all major projects. With a 150+ strong development team sitting idle, the account team decided to forge ahead, aiming to recoup billable hours following a formal contract.
My original plan centered on a theme drawn from earlier Kentucky IE research: public distrust. In an effort to address that insight head on (and involve as many Deloitte disciplines as possible), I had proposed a RITE approach (rapid iteration, testing, and evaluation) to be led by a combination of our service design strategists and studio product designers, and documented by our advertising and marketing colleagues. The result would be a cross-business unit project team (part of my forecasting plan for the Austin studio) and genuine public participation in the product development — captured in media that could be used in awareness campaigns and as content for the site itself.
Under the circumstances, however, my ambitions would need to be scaled back: without explicit client involvement, Deloitte was prohibited from reaching out to the Kentucky IE user community (if just to preserve the client relationship). What we lost in research insight and evaluative validation, we gained in design latitude! User testing was planned and prepared, but any recruiting or scheduling was postponed indefinitely.
I joined the project about three months into a painstaking requirements gathering exercise undertaken with Deloitte’s own Benefind operations and maintenance team assuming the role of client and user proxy.
Kentucky’s benefits programs were relatively few in number , reducing some complexity
focus on the application hub
hub and spoke concept and cognitive rationale
debate between design for edge and design for mode
51% single, another 30% two member HH
bold type, negative space to breathe
easy escape hatch
Though the experience structure is generally consistent, the state specific circumstances can be quite different. The shared solution would need to support
- different levels of client technological sophistication
- different qualitative and quantitative success metrics
- different numbers of programs offered
- different technology platforms
This is the second in a three part series on my work in the integrated eligibility space. The first can be found here, the third here, and the introduction and overview for the series here.
