California: Forms Redesign

Redesigning the applications for three flagship benefits programs: unemployment, disability, and paid family leave.

California’s Employment Development Department oversees the state’s Unemployment Insurance, Disability Insurance, and Paid Family Leave programs. The application forms for these programs were outdated, with confusing instructions and language. This led to frequent mistakes by applicants, which necessitated extra manual processing by EDD staff.

As part of a broader effort to make it easier for Californians to apply for benefits, EDD hired Nava in 2022 to improve the language, design, and accessibility of the applications for UI, DI, and PFL. I joined as a senior content designer and content strategist to collaborate with several user researchers on the Nava team. This project was a little unusual in that we tackled the redesign of the print forms first, to provide a strong content foundation for the subsequent redesign of the online applications.

While my Nava colleagues performed extensive human-centered research to understand the current applicant experience and identify common problems for applicants and EDD staff, I worked closely on the content with a small EDD team. Collectively, we scrutinized the language, logic, assumptions, and business needs of every question. With a goal of making the forms as short as possible, we worked to identify questions that weren’t strictly required by law, so we could recommend eliminating them.

To focus our ongoing collective work and move the most important details out of the spreadsheets, I developed an elegant approach in Figma that allowed us to display, track, and update our most important findings and recommendations for every question. When the time came to share our work with key stakeholders for feedback and approvals, my Figma approach made it easy to pull the relevant portions into FigJam for presentations and feedback.

After many months of research, testing, content refinements, and stakeholder suggestions, we completed drafts of the print applications with clearer instructions, better structure, simplified language, and lots of concise contextual help text throughout.

Afterward, I used the print drafts as the foundation for designing question-flow diagrams for the online applications.

This project is still ongoing at EDD.