Creating a Web App to Share Promising Practices in the Child Welfare Space
The Client: Marina Nitze
Our team worked with Marina Nitze, an experienced civic technologist. Marina was previously the Chief Technology Officer of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, helped found the U.S. Digital Service, and served as a Senior Advisor on technology in the Obama White House.
After leaving the federal government in 2017, Marina brought her bureaucracy-hacking skills to the child welfare space. Marina first became interested in this issue area after volunteering as a Court-Appointed Special Advocate for at-risk foster youth for over a decade. She is currently a Public Interest Technology Fellow at the New America Foundation where she runs an 18-state working group with foster care officials to identify and implement promising practices in foster care.
The Problem
Through Marina’s working group with foster care officials from around the country, she identified three key problems:
- Child welfare is administered at the county and state level, as opposed to the federal level. Because of this, the child welfare system is decentralized and every state has its own policies, practices, data infrastructure, etc.
- States currently operate in silos and have few ways to learn from each other. This means that many states are trying to reinvent the wheel to solve common problems.
- Comparisons across child welfare systems tend to be PDFs that are hundreds of pages long and difficult to parse. Because information about state-by-state comparisons is relatively inaccessible, it is harder to create a sense of “positive peer pressure” that can motivate states to improve their own child welfare systems in small, tractable steps.
Marina found that state foster care officials were extremely enthusiastic about the collaborative nature and practical advice of her working group. She wanted to find a way to scale the most beneficial aspects of her working group through a web application. This would allow state foster care officials not already in her network the ability to access this valuable information.
The Solution
We created a web application called The Child Welfare Playbook. This web app aims to provide state foster care officials with useful information about what other states are doing in the child welfare space. Our hope is that states will be able to collaborate, learn from each other, and take action to improve the child welfare system in their state. In this 7-minute video walkthrough, our Senior Software Engineer, Nikita Jindal, walks through how to use the Child Welfare Playbook. She goes over the various features of the progress dashboard, how to understand the various tables in the backend, and how to generate a new page on the web app using a form.
Project Goals
At the beginning of the semester, our team engaged in a two-week design sprint to understand the issue area and conducted user interviews with state foster care officials from Washington State. These user insights guided our initial Figma designs and implementation. Based on these user interviews and our weekly discussions with Marina, we landed on three main goals for our web app:
GOAL #1: To create “positive peer pressure” to motivate states to improve their own child welfare systems.
To create positive peer pressure, we took inspiration from Code for America’s social safety net scorecard, a national comparison of the digital accessibility of social safety net applications. Code for America uses glyphs to visually represent which social safety net applications each state had available online. This visual comparison effectively allows states to see exactly how they stack up against others across the nation in a single graphic. We met with Code for America’s developers to gain additional insight and develop our own version of their nationwide comparison.
GOAL #2: To be actionable for local government officials.
Based on our user interviews with foster care officials from the Washington State Department of Children, Youth, and Families, we learned that information about rationale, implementation advice, and specific examples of implementation of promising practices were most helpful. In our web app, we provide information about rationale and implementation for users in the form of a pop-up when they click on a promising practice:
GOAL #3: To be a flexible tool that Marina can continue to use in the future.
More importantly than creating a specific page, we wanted to create a tool that Marina could continue to use in the future to share promising practices about other issue areas within child welfare.
Marina is able to generate a new page with 0–50 states, 0–7 promising practices, and 0–3 sub-practices within each promising practice. She can initialize a new page using a simple interactive form and continue to edit/update this data in Django’s backend interface.
The Impact
Marina plans to use this Progress Dashboard to visualize and share the promising practices she learns about from her 18-state working group. Through positive peer pressure and practical implementation advice, state foster care officials will be better equipped to improve their own foster care systems.
Reflections
Challenges
One major challenge was figuring out an ambitious yet realistic project timeline. Because we had a less defined project at the beginning, it took several weeks to finalize our design. At first, we considered using an interactive color-coded map for our nationwide comparison. After several rounds of iterative design and user interviews, we landed on our final choice of glyphs to display the nationwide comparison. After finalizing the features for our minimum viable product, we engaged in extensive conversation with Marina to figure out the most logical prioritization for additional features.
Learnings
Our entire team learned a LOT this semester! Here are a few quotes from our final presentation:
“A major challenge for me has been just learning full-stack web development — both frontend and backend. I think how far I’ve come really speaks to how much help I’ve gotten from other software engineers on the team and Nikita. A major learning for me has been applying problem-solving skills — like figuring out how to structure the backend — but also more broadly, learning more about the civic tech and social impact space and the opportunities that are available there.” Anne Foley, Software Engineer
“My biggest learning was about the iterative design process and why it’s so important, especially in the realm of social impact tech… As the only UX designer on this team, I learned how to be independent, make my own decisions, and be responsible for talking to people and asking the correct questions for the sake of the whole team… I received so much great feedback… from team members, from user interviewees, from Marina… and it’s been inspiring to turn that feedback into a final product.” Catherine Huang, UX Designer
The Team
Monica Chang (Project Manager), Nikita Jindal (Senior SWE), Catherine Huang (UX Designer), Justin Ye (SWE), Anne Foley (SWE), Katherine Lazar (SWE)
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Marina Nitze for being an innovative and collaborative client. We are grateful for all the state foster care officials from Washington State’s Department of Children, Youth, and Families that contributed their valuable insights through user interviews and user testing. We want to thank Emily Wright-Moore and JJ Naughton from Bloom Works for lending their UX and engineering expertise to advise us during this project. Lastly, we would like to thank the entire T4SG community for connecting our team with Marina and for the support!