Third Party School Testing Apps
In Texas, third parties handle driving school and tests
Our team needed to create applications to take them from an analog process to a digital one.
Time to be a boss
Up until this point, my projects had been mostly sole contributor, design evangelist roles, so I needed to find a project that could allow me to grow as a designer and an art director.
Project Needs
The team was stacked with amazing UX designers, so I was able to help out with the UI and Interaction side of things, which is my jam. For once, we were able to create a custom development solution, so the sandbox was large.
Let's try to move away from mail guys…
The process in the past was that the driver would goto the schools, take drivers ed or the driving test, then the school would assemble a physical packet of forms. This packet was mailed (yes, mailed) to the state to make the final determination if the driver would be approved for a license. Needless to say, this process took a while and offered very little insight as to where applications were in the process.
Three apps, one license
The solution: Create an application for the schools to send packets electronically to the state. The state would also have a portal to make decisions on packets, and the drivers would have integrations with TxT to pay for the license fees. In the end it was pretty basic architecture. The state portal had features to search, view and update packets. The school side had the ability to create and send packets. The drivers were able to see the fees in TxT to pay, and were alerted to updates in the process.
Make it enjoyable
I have a common saying when creating government applications, "No one loves working, so why don't we make them like it a little bit more?". These folks use delightful commercial applications everyday, so why do we assume it's okay to make them work on something that is not as fun? With that in mind, I tried to spice up the application with a bit more motion, to make it come alive.
Bring it to life
Working directly with our wonderful front-end devs, we sprinkled in "transform" everywhere and plan out more complex interactions and animations. Where things we're too complicated to explain, I made codepen protoypes.
On to the good stuff
While not sexy by any stretch, we had a lot of screens to crank out on the school side. Uploading accordions, progress bars and error states (oh my).
Integration time
Once more into the fray with less sexy work, but more challenging. This particular flow needed to actually pull users from one identity validation into another if they were under a certain age. We were able to work with dev to inline validate the DOB and redirect them with all the filled information to the next form.
Outcomes
Unbeknownst to me, soon after I joined the team, our projected hours ran out. Rather then let the whole team know, the PM had us keep working. We had two applications and an integration to create. As we finished the first application, leadership came down like a fucking hammer and told us to wrap up in a month. That's when I decided to be more involved in project planning.
We cut every corner we could, we moved fast and broke a few things, but we hit our deadline with a pretty solid set of designs to work from. Up to this point, I assumed the people running things know what they were doing, but my learning point was that I need to be more involved with planning. Design always needs a voice in the room, or people will assume it can be done in a month.
Coming soon!
I also filled in for a CD on a new integration with TxT this spring, bringing more functionality to the mobile app. While my work was minimal, there's some fun bits I'll add.