Returned 108 Weeks of Staff Time a Year Using Data and Workflows

Image with a white background. In the top left is the U.S. Department of Homeland Security Seal with an eagle on the front, a shield over its chest, an olive branch in one foot and arrows in the other. The words, "U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services" is in the top right. Half of an American flag with a brass-looking flag poll is also features. Image is under a Creative Commons license from https://www.uscreditcardguide.com/wp-content/uploads/immigrationUS.jpg

Overview: I helped the data team in Asylum Headquarters of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services build a data experience practice that combined human-centered design, research and facilitation. The 15-person data and reporting team produced dashboards and reports for asylum field offices, agency executives and federal partners. I developed and implemented a strategy that returned more than 108 weeks of staff time each year by improving dashboard usability, reducing engineering rework and aligning the data with the needs of diverse teams.

Role: Principal Designer, Lead Qualitative Researcher and Project Manager

Year: 2023

Image with a peach-colored background that has the following text: "Interview Summary Top-Level Question: How do you, in a field office, experience the [ABC]* dashboard? Interviewed 1 Person, 14 Feb. 2023 Supervisory Asylum Officer, Field Office, Uses the dashboard 3 x week. 'Post-Interview data is hard to find.' 'To the officer [looking in the XYZ system] this case is lost [when it's not on the ABC dashboard.' "The ABC report does not allow us [...] to know where cases are in their lifetime.'"
Abridged view of an interview summary that THE DATA TEAM ANALYZED

Findings:
– Operations staff spent weeks reformatting data to make dashboards usable for field offices
– Engineers built new dashboards without early validation from end users
– Case data definitions were unclear between front-end systems and backend reports
– Policy teams made content strategy decisions using only regulations, not analytics

My Value:
– Conducted short interviews with team members to identify workflow gaps and pain points
– Completed discovery research and usability testing with field offices and headquarters staff to improve dashboard design rapidly
– Created quick feedback templates so engineers could validate requirements before spending weeks clarifying the ask and doing development
– Mapped case management processes with a data engineer to clarify how data fields moved from intake to dashboards
– Introduced web analytics to policy teams to prioritize a product’s content updates
– Facilitated strategy sessions that helped supervisors and managers align work across data, engineering and policy/compliance teams

Reflections:
This project showed how design and research can create measurable time savings and better data quality in high-pressure environments. By combining usability testing, process mapping, and facilitation, we helped the asylum program make faster, clearer, and more data-driven decisions.