Challenge

The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) provides a variety of services that help motor vehicle departments across the United States and Canada better serve the public.

One of those services is AAMVAnet, a network service that enables speedy and secure system-level interoperability and information exchange between motor vehicle departments. Because computer systems, network infrastructure, and data formats differ greatly across motor vehicle departments in different jurisdictions, the verification, onboarding, and maintenance of compliance to AAMVAnet interoperability standards and protocols is a fairly complex process.

After years of tweaks, changes, and evolving technologies, the processes and tools for verifying and onboarding motor vehicle departments systems to AAMVAnet had become manually intensive, inefficient, and in need of an update. AAMVA needed a UX consultancy with enterprise UX and service design expertise to help them rethink processes, unify, and update the inward- and outward-facing systems and tools to streamline and improve the verification, onboarding, and maintenance lifecycle.

Approach

Experience by Design (EBD) kicked things off the project with a series of planning work sessions with members of AAMVA’s stakeholder and project teams, a review of existing tools and processes, and a series of brief observational sessions with customer support and testing and QA staff. We used the findings from the meetings, reviews, and studies to draft a formal brief that outlined key insights, a proposed plan, and timeline for the project. Recommendations included:

• An end-to-end review of testing, QA, and customer onboarding processes and work activities.
• A concept for a visually-oriented test, QA, and compliance scenario modeling tool to standardize, streamline, and automate as much of the test setup for onboarding and compliance testing as possible.

After socializing and reviewing a draft of the brief with AAMVA’s customer support and testing and QA SMEs, we presented it to leaders of AAMVA’s program office, customer support, and testing and QA teams for feedback and approval. Once approved, we launched parallel analysis and design work streams:

• Scheduling and conducting more in-depth contextual inquiry and follow-along studies to identify inefficiencies, pain points, and gaps for users.
• Working with SMEs from the customer support and the testing and QA teams, both individually and in groups, to unpack and model both the current and ideal “To-Be” end-to-end onboarding and testing workflows and processes.
• Collaborating with senior members of the IT and software engineering teams to brainstorm possible solutions and gauge feasibility, define boundaries, and set scope for the testing tool feature set and UI.

The work sessions also yielded novel designs for a more logically structured and intuitive testing tool that used a library of customizable template-based scenarios that would simplify the creation, running, and sharing of valid test scenarios by and between internal AAMVA and external motor vehicle department personnel.

Result

Together with AAMVA’s SMEs, we delivered a streamlined and more unified testing process, and designs for a more user-friendly tool with a shallower learning curve. This new process provided greater efficiencies and resulted in better collaboration between AAMVA and external motor vehicle department personnel involved in testing, validating, and monitoring compliance and interoperability of systems on AAMVAnet. The new tool’s visual model-based UI and template library improved user performance by making it easier and efficient for AAMVA and motor vehicle users to create and test scenarios.

List of Services

• UX Strategy
• UX Team + Design Management
• Project Management
• IA, IxD, + UI Design
• Process, Workflow + Task Analysis
• One-on-one Interviews + Contextual Inquiry
• Collaborative Design Workshops