PHASE 1: Original Research Plan

Notice and Comment Research Plan

Mid-January to Mid-February (or once a partner is secured)

Problem statement

The regulatory process of public comment is an integral part of the United States’ participatory democracy. It forces government agencies to get feedback from the public and react to that feedback before regulations can be changed.

Currently this process exists through the Federal Register which publishes the changed parts of a regulation, this document is called a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). This NPRM is open for a set comment period (anywhere from 30-90 days) where the “public” can comment.

This study will hope to understand the users of this information (both inside the federal agency and out), what each group’s goals are, how to best meet them, and hopefully how we can open this process up to the larger public.

Research Phases

These phases start when a partner agency is identified, and agrees to work with us. NOTE: EPA partnered with us.

Phase 1: High-level internal interviews, contextual inquiry, & recruiting

One sprint (two weeks) spent on understanding the partner agency’s regulatory environment and how their regulations team works through the notice and comment process. This will involve interviews with staff (in person or over the phone) who write and interpret the agency’s regulations and other regulatory materials.

This phase will also involve developing research questions and recruiting external users for phase 2. We will be looking for people who have commented on rules in the past, and plan to do so again in the future. There are a few ways we can recruit users:

• Manual recruiting: The agency partner will have a group of users they generally interact with. We can start by contacting this group, and ask for more contacts through each interview. This is probably the fastest way to start, but will not get us enough variety of users to fill the study. NOTE: This was a success. We spoke to a handful of users this way.

• Ethn.io: We can set up an Ethn.io screener on one of the agency’s main regulatory web pages. This allows us to meet users where they are during their research process, and helps to pull out a more diverse group of users. The actual implementation of this screener will not take long, but the agency has to agree to use the screener. NOTE: This was a success. It allowed us to recruit a more diverse group of participants very quickly.

We will need to use a combination of the above methods to recruit users for phase 2.

This phase will end with a synthesis workshop that will include the whole team. The goal is to have a full understanding of internal user needs.

Phase 2: Conversations & contextual inquiry with legal resource users

Two sprints spent interviewing external users of the agency’s regulations and related legal resources. Ideally the bulk of this research will include contextual inquiry (where the interview is held in the context of the place the work is normally done), but can also be done over the phone if necessary.

In addition to user interviews, we will also run a handful of usability tests around eRegulations’ comparison mode. Currently the assumption is that this new feature would be built on top of the current comparison mode. In order to properly plan in phase 3, we will need to know what is and isn’t working in that view. This will also help us learn if that view should be included in the notice and comment feature at all.

This phase will end with a synthesis workshop that will include the whole team. The goal is to have a full understanding of the types of external users and their needs.

Phase 3: Synthesis & recommendations

From the previous two phases, we will have a solid foundation of interview notes, observations, and artifacts (documents, photos, and process indicators) to build on. From these, we will find patterns in the research through an iterative process of grouping similar research responses and observations. These patterns will drive creation of concept sketches and prototype user flows.

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General background

• Phase 1: Generative research
  • Original research plan < You are here!
  • Findings
  • Workshop with EPA results and user stories
• Phase 2: Testing the tool
  • Findings
• Phase 3: Success?
  • Comment period research plan
  • Findings