The Client

The California DMV is the state agency that administers vehicle registrations and driver’s licenses. California has about 27 million licensed drivers, by far the most of any state (10 million more than Texas, the second state). All current and new Californians have to either book an appointment or stand in line at a DMV location to procure a license or registration.

UX Challenge

My team was tasked with overhauling the CA DMV mobile app’s existing appointment booking process, which has major usability issues. 

We were eager to take on this behemoth agency with a notoriously negative reputation among Californians. The only way was up.

Our broad goals were to:

• Improve the CA DMV’s negative reputation by providing a more accommodating functionality in their mobile experience

• Ease the load on DMV customer service and other staff by improving efficiency and functionality in the online appointment booking process

• Make the app universally accessible for the wide breadth of users that would need to access it, from high schoolers to senior citizens and all languages and levels of English fluency, considering that CA is the most culturally diverse state in the US

Research & Empathy

Analyzing the DMV

In order to grasp the extent of the issues with the CA DMV app, we carried out a preliminary Heuristic Evaluation based on Jakob Nielsen’s heuristics to explore any current mobile heuristic standards that the app violates.

Next I led a competitive and comparative analysis to compare the CA DMV app with the DMV mobile sites and apps (where applicable) of other states including New York, Ohio, and Georgia. 

We noticed several inconsistencies- for instance the CA DMV app was the only one missing a dedicated page for accessing all DMV Forms in the universal navigation.

It should be noted that other states’ DMVs had much better availability on their appointment systems, because driving isn’t as prevalent in any other state compared to California. 

The CA DMV faces by far the highest level of demand and stresses on its system. While daunting, this means it is even more essential than any other state  to make sure that its appointment process is efficient and user friendly. 

The Frustrated Masses

We conducted user interviews and ran usability tests with 10 people who had recent experience with the CA DMV and/or their web presence. We asked about their perceptions of and experiences with the DMV, as well as their preferred methods for booking appointments. 

Each interviewee responded with negative opinions about the DMV, lamenting the long lines and government inefficiency.

During the task analysis portion of our interviews, we asked our target users to book an appointment at the local Santa Monica DMV office using the app. 

Consistently across the board, users expressed intense frustration with the app throughout this process, and a couple subjects did not complete the task because of this.

“This app represents the worst of bureaucracy”

-Anonymous Interviewee, 25

Some hurdles that users faced during the usability test included:

Navigation

Users did not find it intuitive to select “Online Services” in the universal navigation in order to book an in-person DMV appointment

Appointment Booking

The biggest issue was the appointment date selection process for any CA DMV location near a major metro area. Users were only offered one first available date and time — 4 months in the future. 

A fully clickable calendar below seemed to indicate that users could try for another date, but these attempts always returned them to the same single appointment. After several attempts, users had to figure out for themselves that they had no choice but to accept the only appointment time that they were offered. 

Research Synthesis

Using the qualitative information we gathered during our user interviews, we conducted several rounds of affinity mapping to explore larger trends and insights. This helped us delve deeper into our target users, and we came away with a better shared understanding of their main pain points, frustrations, goals and priorities. 

Combining the major insights that we gained about our target users through affinity mapping, we created our user persona, Tariq. 

This process was clarifying and helped us empathize with the needs of our target users throughout the design process. We continuously returned to him to ground ourselves in our core mission of ensuring our decisions ultimately helped improve our users’ experience. 

With our users’ needs and characteristics now at the forefront, we formulated our main aim.

How might we help users seamlessly book a DMV appointment that will accommodate their time?

For a deeper grasp of our users’ experience with the CA DMV app, I designed a user journey map based on our task analysis results and the scenario of our persona in order to follow his appointment booking process. This provided us with insight into where in the flow we could focus our efforts. 

We created wireflows of the existing app to better visualize the current path for booking an appointment on the CA DMV app. We also went through a few rounds of card sorts with target users to learn how they decided to organize different sections of the app’s universal navigation.

Ideation & Design

Sketching Ideas

Feeling that we had a good grasp of our users’ pain points and desires, we conducted a Design Studio session to start implementing our vision for a new and improved DMV app. 

We rapid prototyped sketches to brainstorm different solutions for our users’ issues, first focusing on the homepage. My team chose to implement my sketch: a simple design with a welcoming prompt, large buttons, and clear icons.

Together we discussed and sketched out the rest of the app’s appointment booking flow on a whiteboard.

After further refining and iterating the sketch designs we agreed upon, I drew up medium fidelity wireframes.

Testing & Iterating

With these changes implemented in the paper prototype, we administered 6 paper prototype tests. Users generally flowed through the redesigned app prototype quickly and smoothly. 

However, some new key pain points arose and we addressed them throughout our iterations:

• When users reached the list of DMV locations near them, they were not sure where to “tap” to select a location— some wanted to select “More Details,” which actually expanded more information about the location. In response we changed the signifier to “Location Details” to clarify its purpose for users, and we added a clear “Select a Date” CTA

After a few iterations and validating user tests, we felt confident with our paper prototype and moved on to design a medium-fidelity clickable prototype together on Figma. 

Next we conducted nine clickable prototype usability tests. For the most part, these continued to run smoothly.

However, based on user feedback we made some changes while iterating during this phase.

For instance, we added an option to sort by appointment date availability to find a DMV location in users’ general region. This was based on users expressing that they were willing to drive a longer distance to avoid standing in line all day

 The main issue that arose during the medium fidelity prototype task analyses revolved around the calendar page, which underwent three iterations:

1. We started with a calendar highlighting how many appointments were available each day to save users time, but they found this too crowded.

2. We replaced the numbers with colors indicating levels of availability, with an explanatory legend below. However this confused users and unintentionally made them think the calendar was not clickable.

3. We ended with a clean, simple calendar without availability indicators as the calendar was already much improved and availability was immediately visible once a date was selected.

Finishing Touches

Finally, we upgraded our design to a high-fidelity prototype. We worked off of the Style Guide that my teammate designed with some team input to rebrand the DMV. 

We incorporated shades of blue to portray dependability, trustworthiness, and security, and included green accents to hint toward a green, eco-friendly state. We kept the overall interface easy to read, with obvious CTA’s to keep our users of all ages focused on the task pathway. 

Results

Some of the user-centered solutions we implemented to address usability issues included:

Accessibility

In order to make the app universally accessible to its wide-ranging audience, we included a translation button on every page, which would remain active once selected. We also added icons wherever possible for added clarity.

Streamlined Booking Process

The overhauled calendar page now highlights which dates have appointment slots available, and lists out those available times immediately below without reloading the page, to provide busy users with more flexibility and transparency. 

Next Steps

• Redesign the rest of the app user flows

• Continue on to redesign the CA DMV website 

• Explore more opportunities to unite the physical and digital DMV spaces and optimize the appointment process for users and staff with live wait times, “get in line online,” live chat, and/or digital form submission

Reflection

Some key takeaways from this project:

• In some cases, implementing a new function to make a product more efficient actually ends up making it less so. The benefits and drawbacks have to be weighed against each other, and in the case of the appointment calendar, providing users with the availability of each date only exacerbated the information overload that we were trying to reign in throughout the app. “Helping” too much beyond what people actually need can unintentionally make the overall experience less user-friendly.  

• People really value convenience, time, and flexibility, and they like to have choices and transparency. This explains their aversion to the current CA DMV bureaucracy and app, which breaks all of these values. Improving the DMV’s reputation involves respecting these values and working around people’s busy schedules by allowing choice and visibility in the appointment booking process, restricting cognitive load by presenting only the essentials, and facilitating their choices of DMV location based on their personal preference, whether by location or availability.