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.
Since 1968, the Civil Rights Data Collection has kept track of key data points relative to civil rights in 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 wanted to make sure that this data could continue to be tracked, while surfacing insights that were meaningful and actionable.
Through stakeholder interviews, I identified these key opportunities:
Here's a fact: as of 2022, black male students in the United States were, on average, suspended 378% more often than white male students for the same infractions.
Power structures in the United States are undeniably constructed to support and perpetuate white male supremacy. Only by working to systematically dismantle those structures will we ever hope to achieve civil equity for everyone else. Even then, it's a marathon.
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. We 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.
