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Crisis Standard
The Crisis Standard helps maintain the quality of the official California coronavirus response website, covid19.ca.gov.
The California coronavirus response website’s goal is to provide accurate, up to date, actionable information to all people in California so that they can feel safe, informed, and be able to complete and adhere to any directives made by the State of California.
Californians don’t distinguish between the different tools and services we provide—they’re all State services—and so that quality needs to extend to everything we provide, whether we see it as part of covid19.ca.gov or not.
To meet the Standard, we ask a series of questions to determine which content, tools and services we publish or link to.
Doing the hard work to make things simple for users has never mattered more. Users need clear, actionable instructions on what to do.
We need to help users understand what they should and shouldn’t do and, most importantly, why they need to do this. In a crisis, it’s easy for users to become stressed and overwhelmed with too much information.
We triage content so the most essential bits come first, and we use words that users recognize. We don’t use unnecessary technical jargon or acronyms, as users won't have time to learn what they mean
- Does the content use words that Californians will recognize?
- Is there a clear action expected?
- Is the content written for 6th grade level when tested in Hemingway?
- Is the content clear to those whose first language isn’t English?
Everyone needs covid19.ca.gov to find out what they need to know, and do what they need to do. It has to be accessible to everyone. It’s not just that it’s the law; it’s the right thing to do.
This includes people with a whole range of disabilities or difficulties, people who use lower-end devices, and people inexperienced with computers. We also translate our content to meet the needs of users whose first language isn’t English, and consider those who might struggle to read.
We publish our content in accessible formats that are most easily read and distributed to all devices (HTML) rather than proprietary, inaccessible, formats (such as PDFs). We use visual design to enhance the usability and accessibility of the plain language content we publish.
- Is the content linking to a web page?
- Do you understand the barriers your users might have to using your service and have a plan for supporting those who might be excluded?
Users come to the covid19.ca.gov site as a jumping off point to address a wide range of needs and service they require. Users need a consistent and joined up experience as they move to other agency’s services and information.
To the end user, it should feel like one seamless experience that never leads them into dead-ends or into loops.
Information and advice must be the same across agencies, never giving the user conflicting actions.
- Does your information and advice contradict that of other agencies and departments?
- Have you considered existing services, platforms and channels that Californians use to access information and advice?
This crisis is ever-changing. What users need from us is constantly changing. We need to be flexible and make changes rapidly based on data, feedback from users and the state government’s response.
User testing is essential, otherwise we won’t know whether we’re making things worse for people or meeting their needs.
We deploy changes in minutes, not days.
- Is there supporting data and evidence for why this content or service should exist?
- Are you capturing analytics to identify if the service is succeeding?
- Have you considered how instructions and messaging will change with time and how to manage outdated content?
We plan for increases and decreases in demand, consider the impacts of our decisions on other services, and have basic operational standards for what we expect from other services we link to.
We expect our partners to share their analytics and name a Service owner that’s accountable for the performance of the service. That service owner is the person who ensures all of the above for their service and who’s woken up in the middle of the night should the service stop working.
- Is there a single, identified Service owner? Who?
- Is there a plan for what happens if the content or service falls over?
- Have you run different scenarios through your service to ensure that your supply chain is resilient?
**With thanks to Lou Downe for their work on principles for design in a crisis and to our friends from Gov.UK. + Original draft.