Increasing User Research Capacity via the Paperwork Reduction Act

The Challenge

The Paperwork Reduction Act (PRA) is a law governing how federal agencies collect information from the public. CMS CX researchers and designers experienced difficulty understanding and navigating the PRA process at CMS

  • Without agency guidance, CX practitioners feared engaging with the PRA Office
  • Without agency guidance, CMS limits the amount of user research conducted including research that does not require an approved PRA clearance
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The Opportunity

Our team collaborated with the CMS Chief Experience Officer and the CMS PRA Office to craft a CMS Customer Experience and Paperwork Reduction Act Playbook.

In doing so, we aimed to accomplish the following:

  • Increase positive touchpoints with PRA desk officers
  • Improve literacy on customer experience and PRA interactions among PRA officers
  • Increase PRA compliant user research activities, especially those not need approval
  • Increase Customer Experience Office capacity to support CX practitioners when conducting research

The Solution

Discovery Sprint

As team lead, I scoped this project by engaging in preliminary secondary research and conducting informational interviews with people across the agency.

I completed the following steps to justify why this product was needed despite other federal resources:

  • Compared 30 General Clearances across government that reference CX Executive Order A-11 Section 280
  • Compared 6 external (across 6 agencies) and two internal PRA resources
  • Annotated OMB memos on PRA and administrative burden
  • Conducted 8+ informational interviews across 2 agencies to hear successes and pain points

In order to solidify buy-in and increase co-ownership potential, we laid out our preliminary recommendations and facilitated a prioritization workshop with leaders representing impacted offices. Additionally, I facilitated conversations with each office director in order to gauge their perspectives prior to this formal kickoff.

These individuals served as regular attendees and informed stakeholders throughout the build.

Clarifying Scope

The following images illustrate my process into clarifying our content and product scope and identifying our primary audiences best served by our MVP.

Coordinating Launch

For our marketing launch, I created a communications plan that included the following:

  • Key dates
  • General talking points for the project
  • Communication goals
  • Priority audience segments
  • Communications timeline
  • Relevant government-wide speaking events
  • Public #paperwork-reduction-act Slack channel, allowing CMS practitioners to follow this work
  • Slack bot prompted whenever users mention “pra”
  • Self-edited Public service announcement featuring the Chief Experience Officer and the CMS PRA Office

Crafting Product Vision

Given this project’s focus on capacity, I collaborated with the Chief Customer Experience Officer and the Chief Digital Strategy Officer to craft the product vision for a broader research operations team.

Based on our initial marketing launch reception and user research findings, we quickly discovered the need to craft a product vision that illustrated this products future impact. This document captured staffing needs, budget considerations, and additional product epics worth prioritizing beyond this first iteration of the playbook. This paired well in illustrating opportunities for the CMS Customer Experience Office to increase its capacity to support practitioners.

Storytelling to Share Learnings

My design lead and I presented this work at Code for America in 2024. Feel free to view a copy of our slide deck and my reflection article.