User-centered development: A case study at the Social Security administration

Work Process Improvement Today, Oct 1998 by Wheeler, Sean

Kenneth S. Apfel, Commissioner of Social Security, recently presented the agency's highest award to fifty employees for their contributions to the development and implementation of the agency's first major client-server application, the Customer Help and Information Program or CHIP The fact that nine users were included in the team award might be considered unusual by some software development teams, but it is consistent with the user-centered development processes that were followed throughout the CHIP project. The popularity of the CHIP software with the agency's telephone representatives is generally believed to be a product of the development team's focus on their users and the tasks they perform.

CHIP is an online help and decision support system that assists the telephone representatives in answering questions and completing actions for customers who contact SSA by telephone. For most common inquiries, CHIP provides the user with instant and pertinent information to identify the caller and instructions to complete the call or requested action. CHIP also contains easyto-use reference material like Bureau of Vital Statistics information and query readers as well as an online teleservice operating guide.

It is easier to appreciate the magnitude of the challenge presented to the development team with a few numbers and a bit of history. SSA initiated its national 800 number service ten years ago and the growth in call volume has been steady since then. The national service provides the public in all fifty states and Puerto Rico with toll-free access to telephone contact representatives between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. every business day. Most contacts are typically requests for information about agency programs or reports by callers that could affect their monthly benefit checks.

In July of this year alone, SSA employees answered 3.8 million calls to the toll-free service and processed nearly 1.2 million changes to agency records. The number of callers served is expected to reach 55.5 million during the fiscal year. Most of the calls were covered by employees permanently assigned to teleservice units established for this kind of work; however, an additional group of employees, known as SPIKES, helped respond to calls received during high volume periods. Although SPIKE employees are thoroughly familiar with federal regulations and agency procedures from their usual work on claims adjudication, they only provide direct public contact services during these high demand periods. Additional complications stem from the impact that the laws of individual states can have on federal regulations and the problems generated by geography and time zones. Agency quality goals stress the importance of efficient (the average conversation in July lasted less than 6 minutes) and consistent service for its customers. Pilot studies demonstrated that the new software supports those efforts.

The CHIP team faced some additional challenges since their product would be the first major application for SSAs new Windows NT-based client-server architecture. Included in their design and coding decisions would be considerations mandated by the assistive devices used by the agency's 823 employees with disabilities. The new application would have to provide intelligent interview support to the teleservice representatives and data transfer to existing mainframe applications used to process caller's change reports. Finally, the team needed to include functionality provided by a DOS-based expert system that had been successfully implemented in a small number of teleservice centers.

The composition of the CHIP team included programmer and analyst representatives and representative users recruited from several of the agency's teleservice units. Early planning efforts resulted in decisions that the team would:

* focus on user defined tasks (currently there are 25 major "use cases" such as benefit estimate requests, overpayment explanations and change of address reports supported by the CHIP software),

* include representative users in all developmental activities,

* utilize object oriented methodology,

* iterate the interface design based on functional and usability testing.

A generalized developmental procedure and schedule was established by the team based on these decisions as shown in Table 1.

Representative telephone contact users participated as full members of the CHIP use case team and the sole evaluators during the usability evaluation step. Their contributions to the project were especially valuable to the team during the following activities:

* Define Use Case Requirements

The representative users were valuable in defining the tasks required to complete each of the use cases. Just as important they were able to define the task sequence generally followed and the circumstances where alternate paths could occur within the use case.

The design considerations that would be required because of the experience and knowledge differences of the full-time teleservice representatives and the occasional SPIKE users were documented during this effort.