Dearborn County is a county located in the U.S. state of Indiana.

The main requirement of the project is to make existing website modern and suggest new features for their website where sheriff can interact with the people actively.

I was given with a jr.user researcher who can complete the user research and produce the results. I was working with a sr manager and a developer along with jr researcher.

Design process:

We were instructed to use IBM design thinking process to follow through entire design cycle.

We start by deeply understanding users by carrying out user research which includes techniques like ethnographic observation and interviews. These provide the input to personas and the summary of the users’ as-is experience scenarios and the identification of pain points that they experience.

In this phase, I was consuming the research results that were given by jr researcher. They helped me to define personas.

We went ahead and identified 3 user groups

1. Administrative staff including sheriff (who manage and produces content in website)

2. Inmate relatives

3.General public

In fact, both inmate relatives and the general public can be combined the reason behind separating them is they are 2 different groups with different intuitions and goals.

Eg: general public may access the website for complaining something but inmate relatives (such as wife/husband) will search for some inmate info and appointments to reach them.

We defined the personas from each group and carried them throughout the design process.

We then explore many widely divergent and creative to-be opportunities.

Since we have a clear understanding of the users we went ahead and with the research records and notes to create the user stories which helped to understand much more about the context and we were able to define the functionalities.

We created some of the task analysis and journey maps so that we can analyze the cognitive behaviors and goals. This helped me to understand users very well it’s very important to find out “What you will do” rather than finding “What you would like to do”

Based on the research and user stories we proposed some advanced functionalities along with standard functions. Which are.

1. Inmate Locator

2. Daily activities

3. Report a crime

4. Submit a question to sheriff

5. Book an appointment

6. News releases

Among these, sheriff refused to “Book an appointment functionality” since this functionality is about booking an appointment to visit an inmate there were some law enforcement activities involved.

We conducted cord sorting operations to prepare sitemap.

As a result, here is the sitemap for the site.

We then prototype the designs often initially using paper prototypes for speed.

We then create the wireframes to give life for all or ideas.

We then evaluate the prototypes with users and based on their feedback, we iterate on the designs if needed.

After confirmation, we created high fidelity wireframes.