Since 1968, the Civil Rights Data Collection has tracked key civil rights data points across America's classrooms. This data is used by education professionals to understand and track improvements and regressions to civil liberties for children across the US. I was tasked with making sure that this program could continue to be funded and tracked, while surfacing insights that were meaningful and actionable.
In 2022, I had the opportunity to partner with AEM Corp to redesign the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) for the U.S. Department of Education.
As a senior designer, my role was to help define visual language and design an interface that would make it easy for teachers, parents, and law makers to source important data related to civil rights in America's classrooms.
While the CRDC had been successful in surfacing important data points, the process for submitting data was cumbersome and opaque, and the insights surfaced from the data were often generic and uncoordinated. This made it difficult for law makers and education professionals to use the data to drive meaningful change.
Through stakeholder interviews, I identified these key opportunities:
To understand the experience of submitting data for inclusion into the CRDC, I mapped the current user's submission journey. This gave me an albatross view of the pains associated with the process. From there, I was able to explore opportunities for future improvements.
By mapping the current state, I discovered that State Coordinators had no way of tracking their submissions after the point of submission. This meant that the only way for states to tell whether their data had been accepted was if the U.S. Department of Education found errors in their dataset and asked them to resubmit. This could take months.
Before I could design the future state for CRDC data submission, I first needed to break it down into manageable tasks. To help with this, I threw together a quick Story Map.
From my discovery findings, I knew that I wanted to create a simple dashboard that would provide State Coordinators with up-to-date details about the status of their submissions. Gone were the days of submitting data into the void.
From there, I began working on the submission upload form, which needed to be simple enough for anyone to use.
The CRDC historically presented data in generic, uncoordinated graphs and visualizations. This caused researchers and law makers to have to do extra legwork in order to understand the larger impacts of the data. Law makers, for example, would generate their own reports from the data in order to find key opportunities for action.
To address this, I designed a custom reporting interface whereby law makers and researchers could generate their own custom reports which were already segmented by the dimensions that matter most to them. Additionally, I provided comparisons against White students wherever possible, as this is a metric that both law makers and researchers commonly use as a benchmark.
Ongoing government funding is core to the ability for the U.S. Department of Education to continue providing data on civil rights in schools. I wanted to present the history of the CRDC in a compelling way, to encourage continued funding. I redesigned the About Us page to showcase that rich history in a highly consumable fashion.
Law makers running for election commonly need to cite civil rights data points while speaking at the podium. I designed a mobile experience to make sure they were able to get the insights they need, to deliver truth when they need.
