The Portland DMV has a problem.
Visitors to the Oregon DMV website report dropping off from the appointment scheduler at alarming rates. Without a process to effectively screen and queue potential appointments, Portland's DMVs are experiencing a high number of unexpected walk-in visitors during peak hours.
<aside> ⚠️ Update: In 2021, being able to successfully schedule visitors' appointments has become even more urgent—the Oregon DMVs are now experiencing a backlog of hundreds of thousands of visitors due to COVID-19.
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To improve the satisfaction of both the visitors and staff, this redesign aims to increase the number of *successfully scheduled appointments *****while reducing the number of ****walk-in visitors during peak hours.
Here are two ways to achieve this goal:
Users report being unable to complete the online appointment flow, referring to the Oregon DMV site as "not user friendly".
One way to increase users is to look at the top-of-funnel and ask who has access to the Oregon DMV website.
The Pew Research Center cites mobile phones as the primary way that Americans can access the internet. Across racial categories, roughly 80% of U.S. adults own smartphones. Further, dependence on smartphones for internet access is greater among people of color, young, and low-income folks.
Because smartphones help the most Americans bridge the internet access gap across categories, we will design for this medium, mobile web. By serving the most available medium, we can help the most users schedule appointments and achieve the greatest business impact.
There are many flows within the Oregon DMV website. We'll choose a popular task: "attaining a Real ID" and define our user as an average Portland resident seeking their Real ID (to comply with Oregon's Real ID mandates). The UX flow will be based on their journey.
UX Audit
Focusing on the cognitive costs of each interaction, I break down the visual and interaction design aspects that warrant an overhaul of the DMV's design. Then, I take to user interviews to gain insight on hypotheses and to validate strategies behind effective UI.
Why are folks dropping off from the Oregon DMV website?
Taken individually, each of these issues makes for a slightly unclear interaction, but with some effort can eventually be understood. Taken together, they create enough frustration that the impulse to leave becomes greater than the need to schedule an appointment.
How we address those issues in the redesign.
Designing for a broad audience is tough. We have to assume these users aren't experts with digital interfaces—they need a simple experience that gets at the heart of things. Most importantly, the UI has to make sense at an initial glance.
Feedback from usability tests suggests that the DMV's text-heavy design discourages users from finishing the appointments flow. It's too visually overwhelming, so I started off with inspiration from Typeform, a brand that makes excellent use of progressive disclosure.
