Texas Online Private Security (TOPS)

Welcome to the Texas Online Private Security project. This was a two year (still ongoing) project I worked on with the Department of Public Safety in Texas. I was part of a 30 person team that included 4 UX Designer/Developers. I'm going to talk about the UX process for this project and present some of the screens we worked on. This application is live at: https://tops.portal.texas.gov/psp-self-service/login/auth

For the TOPS project we had a DPS employee on each agile team(4) which was a bit unusual but having an SME/Product Owner on the team was really helpful. Some decisions could be made during agile ceremonies and any other questions were answered quickly.

I learned immediately that the client was a very visual one. They really appreciated higher fidelity mockups as they struggled conceptually with the traditional wire frames and whiteboard flows. I used 'Axure' to mockup all the flows and screens.

The TOPS project was split into pieces. We had an internal facing piece that managed the businesses and constituents applications. We had a team working the external facing constituent and another working on the external facing business. Finally, the 4th agile team worked on the process management and custom search among other things. Everything came together during the last 6 months of the delivery. The application was built using a Grails back end and a Angular front end. We used bootstrap as a base template for HTML and CSS.

UX worked hard on branding and providing a familiar experience throughout the Private Security application process. We got the opportunity for a lot of in person user testing and user feedback sessions with the DPS employees. Sessions included A/B testing new sections and quick feedback sessions at the end of every other sprint. This really helped us iterate efficiently. One of the highlights was actual tears of joy from a DPS employee when we fixed a frustrating and time consuming process she'd dealt with for years. This was one of many wins for us and made all the hard work worth it.

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