Code for America — Pamela Hastings

Code for America works shoulder to shoulder with community organizations and government to build digital tools and services, change policies, and improve programs.

I served as Principal Designer with multi-disciplinary teams to uncover needs and co-design solutions that are inclusive, accessible, and easy for everyone to use. We brought best practices and design methods to bear in service of creating the conditions for generational, systemic change while also delivering immediate material value to communities through streamlined access to critical government services.

I also served as a design leader to foster a strong design practice, culture, and operations that leverage the power of human-centered design.

Georgia Pathways to Coverage: A Research Pivot

In this focused study, we set out to map the client journey through Pathways: Learn, Apply, Wait, Report, to flag where administrative burden was costing people coverage they were eligible for. The plan was straightforward: understand the experience of people applying for coverage, see where they get stuck, and develop some insights about where we might improve the service.

We couldn't find enough people to interview. Not because we recruited poorly — because so few people had successfully enrolled that there weren't enough to reach. That's when the project's real question stopped being "what's the experience like" and became "why is almost no one getting through."

The Pivot

We shifted to interviewing six community-based organizations and assisters who'd worked directly with applicants — the Sickle Cell Foundation of Georgia, Primary Care of Southwest Georgia, the Latin American Association, Georgians for a Healthy Future, Centene, and Positive Impact Health Centers. They'd seen what individual applicants couldn't easily describe in aggregate: the same failure points, over and over, across very different clients.

We mapped the full journey — Learn, Apply, Wait, Report, then Report again every month — and rated the pain at each step. The worst of it clustered in two places: people couldn't tell if they qualified or what documents they'd need before they ever applied, and once they'd applied, they had no way to check status, no clarity on how decisions were made, and no reliable way to reach a person at the state agency (DFCS) when something went wrong. We paired that mapping with a heuristic evaluation against Nielsen Norman Group's established usability standards, which gave the burden a name beyond "people are confused": specific, fixable violations of basic design practice — no visibility into system status, no help when users got stuck, no recognition cues to reduce what people had to recall.

What We Found

Six months after launch, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that 2,344 Georgians had ever enrolled in Pathways — 0.02% of the state's population, covering 0.7% of those likely eligible (CBPP Policy Insights, January 25, 2024). The number wasn't a design problem hiding behind good intentions. It was the direct, measurable result of every friction point we'd just mapped.

What We Learned

When your research plan breaks because the thing you're studying barely exists, don't patch around it — that's the finding. The hardest part of this work wasn't the methods. It was reporting a number that bad, plainly, to people who'd hoped for a better story.