Imagine that you’ve lost your job. With bills to pay and perhaps a family to support, you go online to apply for unemployment benefits. Yet rather than take some comfort in the process, you struggle with a hard-to-use application form, confusing language and unclear directions.
That’s not how government is supposed to help.
In New Jersey, officials are finding ways to make agencies the resource they should be. Through a pilot project with the U.S. Department of Labor and the U.S. Digital Service, the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development (NJDOL) is leading a national effort to redesign claimants’ experience.
From beginning to end, the benefits process is clearer, more seamless and more compassionate.
What Has Changed
There is a new, mobile-friendly application form and emphasis on plain language and Americans with Disabilities Act compliance. Email and paper communications are more helpful. The phone system better serves people who want to speak with a human.
At the back end, more flexible technology replaces an older, less nimble system. And using an agile approach, NJDOL can make individual improvements as needed.
“We’re evaluating policy, we’re evaluating technical practices to try to build a system that is both resilient to huge upswings in people needing the service as well as flexible, so that when policy requirements at the federal level or state level change, we can meet that,” said Gillian Gutierrez, Senior Advisor/Director of NJDOL’s Office of Unemployment Insurance Modernization.
How It’s Changed
Reform has come in two parts.
First, to more immediately improve what people experience (e.g., when applying online or responding to NJDOL emails), the agency “figured out a way to overlay all of those improvements on top of our existing system,” Gutierrez explained. “Our underlying system stayed the same, but the experience that the consumer [has] is completely different.” The new visual design of the application form is based on the New Jersey Web Design System, which itself is based on the U.S. Web Design System.
Second, the agency is relaunching the infrastructure that supports the claimant intake system. But rather than purchase technology that exists in another state or that a vendor says will meet 75% of NJDOL requirements, the agency is building a new system that gives it more control.
Gutierrez said that when policy directives change or other adjustments are needed, the new approach “allows us to pick off a piece, make the edits in the technology and then put that new thing back, instead of having to replace wholesale the [entire] thing.”
The Right Direction
The state processed 2.4 million applications between 2020 and 2021. Before the pandemic, it consistently led the country in the percentage of unemployed people who ultimately receive unemployment benefits.
But Gutierrez said that 66% of people applied using their mobile phones and because the application form wasn’t mobile-friendly, many made input errors as they “pinched and scrolled and looked for a dot to fill.”
The changes seem to be working. After filing their initial online applications, claimants may complete a survey, and overall response trends are positive, she said.
The agency also asks for feedback on the redesigned emails: 53% of respondents say today’s emails are less confusing than prior versions, 51% say they’re more trustworthy and 57% feel the emails make it easier for them to take actions.
“We believe we’re going in the right direction,” Gutierrez said. “States have always procured systems in a specific way. I think the pandemic opened up, at least in New Jersey, the small political space to say, ‘Let’s try something different.’”
This article appeared in our guide, “State and Local: Making an Impact.” For more insights into state and local innovations that are changing communities, download it here:
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