Background
Empowering the American public to support competitive markets
The DOJ’s Antitrust Division receives 1k complaints per day, on average. To submit, a user had to find an email address on DOJ’s large website. Staff then had to triage submissions and separate them from spam and irrelevant messages.
The DOJ hired 18F to help find a better solution. My team’s task was to audit the current complaint system, suggest improvements, and work with the DOJ to recommend whether to build their own replacement, or work with a vendor to use an existing platform.
“[Mel’s] designs were gorgeous, creative, and professional. … I found it very easy (as a developer) to translate Mel’s ideas to HTML and CSS. The best part is that Mel was comfortable doing some of the development, as well, which meant I didn’t have to worry too much about tricky CSS. I really enjoyed working with Mel and would love to do it again in the future!”
Jessica Dussault, Consulting Engineer at 18F
Process
We interviewed DOJ staff about their existing process and pain points, and the public about the process of reporting a violation. We also evaluated several vendors of case management systems and prototyped a potential internal solution to streamline the management process.
I interviewed 35 people with our team’s service designer, created wireframes and mockups to communicate with our partner.
I also built a clickable prototype and collaborated on building a static prototype of our proposed front-end interface with our engineer so we could conduct usability tests with the public.
Results
Buy over build
After weighing the pros and cons of building custom software or buying and configuring third-party software, we recommended the DOJ hire a vendor to build a bespoke solution.
Our final report helped DOJ ATR secure funding from the Technology Modernization Fund in order to move forward with the next stage of this project.
Since 18F offboarded, DOJ ATR has already updated their front-end using some of our recommendations.