CMS RFQ: Human Centered Design

RFQ ID: RFQ1494360

“Through the contractor’s effort and collaboration with product teams, the organization expects to drive products and services that more effectively support the Medicaid and CHIP program and agency objectives, drive value and an improved user experience, and ultimately solve the needs of our user community with least burden to all.”

Task 1: Implement an Enterprise Human Centered Design Practice across the MACBIS program

The DSG objectives for Task 1 are as follows:

1. Create transparency and visibility into the product research happening across MACBIS products and identify product opportunity areas where MACBIS products intersect to leadership. Implement and maintain a centralized digital location for housing product and service research artifacts (findings, relevant data, personas, journey maps, and other HCD Documentation).
2. Create and maintain central materials that benefit all HCD teams in MACBIS, including but not limited to: (a.) journey maps of user journeys that cross more than one MACBIS product, (b.) a stakeholder map of our core CMCS customers that expresses their maturity level and exposure to HCD methods but also helps coordinate interviews across MACBIS, and (c.) a MACBIS HCD playbook (referenced below).
3. Make the best use of DSG’s limited time with our CMCS and state Medicaid program users by eliminating repetitive research with the same users, and making better use of the research we have already done. For instance, retain a central database to track user engagement efforts, including a running list of end users who have opted in to participate in user research, information on these engagements such as user name, role, scope of research and feedback received. Several product teams have put tracking in place at the product level. Ultimately, the database is to be available across the product portfolio and used before soliciting new users for research.
4. Recommend and adopt a minimum standard for HCD practice in MACBIS once standards are established and mutually agreed upon across teams and provide hands-on help to HCD staff on individual contracts in managing and conducting research engagements against standards. Lead the development and ongoing maintenance of a HCD playbook that outlines HCD methodologies, common terminology and tools, consistent practices, standard templates that MACBIS user experience (UX) teams should follow. It should be leveraged by teams for onboarding new HCD resources and serve as a reference guide for existing UX teams to drive alignment across our collective HCD efforts…

Task 2: HCD Design tools

Provide expertise and recommendations around the HCD product tool set used across the MACBIS portfolio. This task is not intended to prescribe required tools but to establish standards and guide recommendation of tools, using open source products where viable, that can be adopted by teams in product delivery.

The DSG objectives for Task 2 include:

1. Assess and recommend best of brand tools to product teams for achieve objectives and periodically assess tool sets against latest industry tool portfolio. Assessment should include a defined evaluation criteria and scoring method that leads to the selection of tools. Recommendations should consider open source products.
2. Develop recommendations for portability of work products between tools used by product teams, i.e. User journeys, service design blueprints, wire-frame prototypes, and how to share and update effectively across teams. Tools must support open format standards for images, text, audio, video, and compression by accredited organization that can be accessed and updated over time. For example, SVG by W3C and JPEG by ISO/IEC for images, CSV/HTML for text, etc.
3. Facilitate product teams demonstrating new HCD tools and/or tool features as part of HCD COP for mutual adoption by the MACBIS HCD product teams.
4. Regularly monitor and measure adoption of the MACBIS research and design tool set.
5. Develop methods to scan HCD product work to evaluate teams are consistently utilizing design.cms.gov…

Tasks 3 (OPTIONAL): Provide HCD practitioner support to specific product teams…