You're welcome. Have a great day, everyone. All right, bye-bye. Thank you,
guys. All right, guys, we're going to move in now to our next presentation.
We're going to have our next presentation by Miss Dana Chisnell, Acting Executive Director
for Customer Experience at the Department of Homeland Security. Hello, Dana, can you hear me?
>> Yes, I can hear you.
>> All right, I can see you. I just want to make sure that you can hear me. Sometimes
that transition, you know, between presenters, you just never know what happens. Just want to
make sure everything is working smoothly. Very good. Seeing you again today, I appreciate that.
>> Likewise, thank you for introducing me, as you do that ritual where I ask,
are you seeing my slides for the sighted people in the audience?
>> And I can't hear anyone, so that's right. So if you guys can
see the slides and if you can hear Miss Chisnell, please put a one in the chat.
Okay, the ones are coming in hot and heavy again. Looks like we are good to go.
>> Excellent! Thank you so much. Hello everyone, I'm Dana Chisnell. I'm Acting
Executive Director for Customer Experience at the Department of Homeland Security. My
pronouns are she/her. I'm an older white woman with short graying brown hair and
I wear brown square glasses. Today, I'm wearing a red speckled blouse with a bow.
I am a person who has not been willing to admit that I may be disabled.
The last panel was really fantastic, and I can't thank the speakers enough for sharing
their knowledge and experience and being out with their disabilities. I'm really honored
to get to speak with you all today and welcome our employees and contractors and our agency partners.
What I want to talk about is how an inclusive environment that centers experiences means
creating an accessible environment, and I loved Annette's metaphor, the best metaphor of the day,
the blueberry muffin thing. I'm stealing that, it's awesome.
So, the Department of Homeland Security, with its wide range of operating components,
has about 1 billion interactions, in person, with the public every year.
The numbers and the scale are staggering, really. This slide shows a few examples,
for, um, one, roughly 25 million people survive natural disasters every year.
The Customs and Border Protection, um, offices and ports of Entry process around 492,000
passengers every day. USCIS conducted about 9,900 Refugee interviews in 2021. Employers
verified around 225,759 people through USCIS' e-verify Service, uh, just in FY22.
750 million people travel through U.S airports every year, and TSA
screens about 8 million Travelers per week under TSA pre-check alone.
So, um, customers at DHS span from disaster survivors to refugees to
domestic and international Travelers, along with employers and non-citizens, and so many others.
For the customer experience team in DHS OCIO, we also see DHS employees as our customers
because we know that the experience that you have as an employee
leaks out into the customer experience for the public. That if you are comfortable and have
what you need to do your work, um, you're going to deliver a better experience to the public.
A key element of customer experience design is understanding who your customers are and what
their needs are. Their needs also come with context, right? So, like, what are
they trying to achieve and, and why? What's the context they're in and, um, when they're trying
to achieve their goals? Is it stressful, is it noisy, do they have everything that they need,
what do they know already about the service or the process, and what they will have to learn while
they're trying to reach their own goals? How much do they know, um, sorry, how are their skills in
understanding how government is organized? This is the thing that we force people to do, right? Like,
you have to know which agency to go to for which things, which, um, is not always intuitive.
What physical, cognitive, or intellectual disabilities might someone have?
What's the literacy level that they have, and what amount of English do they actually have
to understand all of that? We borrow heavily from a set of methods from humans,
design, instead of real people, we make interactions accessible and equitable.
So, looking at the shared goals of accessibility and customer experience across DHS, um,
is what I'm here to talk to you about today. So, integrating accessibility best practices during
design, um, putting, mixing the blueberries in the muffin, not leaving them on top.
Um, integrating accessibility practices during design and
development will enhance the customer experience for everyone. Accessibility
further improves customer engagement by removing barriers to content.
I'm going to cover three areas of shared goals between CX and accessibility and highlight an
example of each of the goals currently in our work streams. Lots of these overlap
and the examples could be interchangeable with any of these areas to some degree.
So, first, we want to talk about inclusive design. Um, as I mentioned, a lot of people are very
stressed when they interact with the Department of Homeland Security, to think they're high, right?
Um, people need benefits often in a hurry and, or they need decisions quickly for a variety
of reasons. So, there's an added cognitive load that disables people even further than they might
already be. Many people DHS interacts with have low English as well. The department is getting
better at language access, but there's still a considerable way to go on this. But we don't talk
about enough and don't design services well for is low literacy. About 54% of American adults read at
or below the sixth-grade level. This covers a lot of territory, uh, a lot of humans. But when you
add in refugees and asylees who are not citizens yet, and people coming through parole programs,
uh, they're very likely to have low literacy as well. Um, but DHS tends to default to delivering
information in print that is challenging for lots of people to comprehend, even for people
with high literacy. So, we're asking the question, why does this happen and what can we do about it?
So, as CX and OAST partner closely, uh, the result will be increased capacity to
better address intersections of identity. So, think about structurally minoritized and, uh,
or racialized individuals who also live with disabilities,
people with low English proficiency, uh, and more. So, uh, we're going to be realigning
CX and Accessibility together to increase all that capacity, and I'm very excited about that.
So, um, here's an example. Uh, we're talking about accessible plain language. The CX team
in OCIO is spinning up a new accessible plain language practice, um, and we're doing that
by establishing a dedicated group within a vision to provide accessible, anti-racist,
culturally responsive, equitable, and inclusive plain language services.
For them, we are also planning to do this by delivering on the secretary's priority
on improving equity and indeed just programs, policies, and initiatives,
including through increasing language access by reviewing complaint processes, as well as
the I-Speak materials to ensure resources are accessible, meaningful, comprehensible,
um, and meets the needs of low English proficiency and low literacy folks. We're going to champion
plain language and language access as core skills that everyone across DHS should take into account.
As you can imagine, taking initiatives like this, um, mean that there's a lot of culture
change involved. So, part of the culture change is addressing this idea of customer,
um, the CX team reframes this to talking about human-centered or user-centered, um, Services,
which makes the goal more relatable. So, you may have noticed that at the beginning of the, um,
presentation, I talked about customers and, um, named the different kinds. That's where we focus,
um, so we asked the question, um, if we do a great job with this service or this product,
whose lives are improved and in what ways. That conversation also
supports talking about outcomes rather than outputs, so how we approach this culture
change is by leveraging partnerships, working together with internal partners within DHS,
and collaborating with community organizations to facilitate these, um, human-centered outcomes.
So, um, partnering with NGOs helps us to understand the needs of non-citizens,
for example, um, there are a couple of notable examples projects that I can talk about. One
of them is that we collaborated with Customs and Border Protection to improve the user experience
for the CBP One mobile application that people are using to submit Advanced information, um,
to a Port of Entry to get an appointment to, um, be screened for parole. We get to partner with
other parts of the organization as well, like ICE, which is working on Plain language observation
for non-citizens who are apprehended at the border, so they know what process they're in
and what their obligations are under whatever, um, immigration status that they have. So, we partner
a lot with internal offices in DHS, such as the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties group, I.T.,
and many more to create a culture that centers accessibility, um, and customer experience.
Through the DHS paperwork reduction act burden reduction initiative, that was a lot of words, and
I'm sorry for anybody who's doing sign language interpretation or, um, if the transcription didn't
come through very well. Through the DHS paperwork reduction act burden reduction initiative,
CX partnered with components to implement various initiatives using human-centered burden
reduction methods to build more equitable customer experiences for both employees and for the public.
Third, um, a lot of, um, the modernization that is happening that many of you are probably involved
with across the Department of Homeland Security isn't public-facing. Um, it's improving systems
for government, um, personnel. Um, it's important because the experience they have leaks into the
experience that our public customers have. Additionally, um, accessibility must be a
core consideration from the start of the project. Right now, um, for example, DHS treats video with
captions and audio and language in other languages besides English as exceptions, mostly because, um,
I believe the organization doesn't have good tools or resources. There aren't enough people who have
the skills to implement these things. Um, we're going from policy directives to or guidance to
plain language printed public information and to other delivery channels, so we need to do better
on these things. And so I call on everyone who is in this virtual room today to think about
how the information that you're creating that ultimately goes out to the public, um, how you
can make sure that that's transportable to lots of other delivery methods and reception methods
by incorporating best practices like usability testing. We can save customers a significant
amount of time and energy because we'll have a much better, um, idea of what their needs are.
So, um, I mentioned that we were working with ICE on, um, informed compliance for non-citizens who
are in the country. Um, the Secretary's priority, Secretary Mayorkas, has created a priority that
includes, um, establishing and implementing a research-driven framework for communications with
non-citizens who are apprehended at the Southwest border that increases compliance with proceedings
and language access. And this is meant to stretch across DHS, so from our website at dhs.gov to CBP
One, the app from Customs and Border Protection, the ICE non-citizen website and portal for
scheduling updates, and related websites and other information at USCIS and the Department of Justice
because this process stretches into that. We want to cover all of those things digitally as
well as through other kinds of messaging and any kinds of fact sheets that might go out.
So, um, the DHS CX team has taken on several multilateral initiatives aimed at simplifying
the experience that non-citizens are having as they navigate the immigration system. Right now,
it looks like you're interacting with four different governments, not different parts
of the same government. And so, we would like to take the first steps toward rectifying that,
making it easier to, um, to make sure that you're meeting your responsibilities.
The goal is improving case management, um, and compliance, really. So, our team
is partnering with ICE to deliver designs for a website, um, as a first step. And then with
Customs and Border Protection, ICE, uh, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services,
and various working groups that are involved in the southwestern border, we've pulled together
a little working group to agree on an approach, um, to ensure that migrants and non-citizens, uh,
can get the information they need, understand what they find, and take actions to comply.
So, by creating equitable, accessible, and human-centered services,
we build a strong foundation of trust in the agency.
So, we'll know that we're successful when we're all asking, whenever we have a decision to make,
what are the outcomes that we want for the people we're serving, and what's the experience we want
them to have as they're reaching that? That is where I want to finish out today,
and now I'll be happy to take questions. Vince, are there any questions for me?
>> Yeah, they'll let me—let me get off of, uh, mute. There, yeah, that was great.
So, folks, this gives you an opportunity to ask all of your questions, um, to Ms. Chisnell. That
was a great presentation. I think that was a lot of information. I was actually making notes,
like always. I was trying to catch them the last part, "Equitable, accessible," and then
I lost you. You took the screen down right when I was trying to get that last part written down.
>> I'll bring it back, okay? Could I do this again twice without—oh, you're doing great. All right,
that's about how to do this, is what I want to do. There you go. Equitable, accessible,
and human-centered services, we build trust.
>> Human-centered services, this is great. Hopefully, everybody on the call really enjoyed
that because I really did. Um, this is some good stuff. I was, um, I always like to take
a lot of notes from all the presenters, and I really like the way your presentation kind of
broke it down in really big chunks, but it wasn't daunting chunks of information, but it made sense,
right? So, I was just kind of putting down some notes here, like the inclusive design,
accessible plain language, cultural change, partnership and engagement,
modernization technology services, especially the last part about the non-citizen informed
compliance for the multi-lateral information for those who are not speaking the same language.
This is just a lot of great, great information. And now, people, of course, are saying, "Oh,
thank you." They want to get access to, you know, your presentation. But I really
would like for you guys to ask any questions that you can think of. So, here's—okay, now
they're starting to come in. Thank you so much. Let's see if I can find one here for you, Dana.
>> Looks like Gary has a question, Gary Morin.
>> Okay, so is the focus on migrants in non— and let's see what happened here.
It looks like it broke apart. Or over U.S. disabled persons.
>> So, oh, so it's a good question, and I can see why you asked that.
Um, I'm gonna stop sharing. Um, that's all right. Uh,
we, uh, I use these examples because they're very present in the work that we're doing right now,
but our focus is both on the employee experience, like what do you need to be the highest performing
person you can be in your job, we want to make sure that you have what you need to
meet the mission. And so, one of the things that we talk about is, uh, Tool Time versus goal time.
If you're focused on, uh, the technology that you're using, uh, that the department is supplying
for your job, uh, then that means that you're not focused on delivering on the mission. So,
for example, uh, I watched an, uh, ICE officer processing someone, and they had to copy and paste
information from five different systems into one PDF, and then print that out, get a wet signature
from the person they were processing, and then re-scan that document into a system. That's very
time-consuming. This is not what the age—like, these are highly qualified, highly trained agents,
uh, and they're spending all this time and energy, uh, on this burdensome administrative stuff.
Add to that, uh, having to do this with maybe sub-optimal tools that are not, uh,
accessible to them because they have some level of disability, uh, and now it just becomes a major,
uh, a major ordeal. And looking at this from the person they're processing, uh,
from the point of view, there, if that person comes in with medical issues or disabilities, uh,
it is often the case that we hand people a printed document in English, uh, to show what we have done
in this interaction. And, uh, they may or may not have, uh, the abilities or the skills to
understand what that is, which disadvantages them in whatever process they're part of.
But the truth is, every day, we're working with all different parts of the department,
um, on employee-facing tools and processes, as well as public-facing, uh,
services that are digital and analog, so it really runs the full range.
>> Excellent. Excellent. Someone said inordinate experience impact outward experiences as well.
>> Love it.
>> All right, any other questions, folks?
Looks like, I said, okay, how do we, how do we serve and support non-Americans with disabilities,
foreign sign languages, print or digital materials in languages other than English,
etc., such as CISA? Kind of what you were talking about there a little bit but—
>> Yeah, this is, this is a huge challenge. Uh, CRCL recently updated the Department language
access plan, but there's a lot of work to do every day to operationalize these things. So,
uh, one thing that we can do for, um, for making information more accessible in other languages is,
uh, use video and audio. Uh, we could have audio readouts of printed documents. This helps lots
of other people too, right? Uh, and, uh, or, uh, we can use animated video that has a voiceover,
so you could make it available in lots of other languages and in lots of other printed languages
without a major lift. The key is, like, we're never going to—okay, I shouldn't say never.
It will be challenging to meet a goal where we can communicate with everyone in the language
that they have, but we can prioritize a large list and expand our offerings across the department.
Different programs in DHS serve different levels of language access right now,
and some of that is because they have done the work to know who their audience is,
and some of it is prioritizing the most frequently encountered languages and
then working out to folks who, um, have languages that are, that we see less so.
Yeah, you just made me think of a couple of things. I'm a geek at heart, of course,
so I was just sitting there thinking to myself as you were talking about, like, how do we
provide it through some form of multimedia, and then the first thing came to mind to me was AI,
using some form of Bot where it doesn't have to be an individual person, right? But then the person
could put in, "This is my native language that I want to be able to convert over from English
so I really understand exactly what is being asked of me." So I did make a note of that.
>> So, yeah, so a few years ago, uh, when I first came back to Federal service in the spring of,
uh, 2021, I had done a study where we were looking at immigration and using
a dedicated device for translation, um, in places where it was difficult to get a
human interpreter in the interaction quickly, and, uh, two years later,
uh, agents or and officers are regularly using Google translate, yep, on your device. It's on the
most people who they interact with, uh, also have devices that have Google translate on them, and,
um, while there are certainly imperfections, uh, it uh has been reasonably effective
in helping in many interactions where we're just not gonna find somebody who's
speaking, uh, an indigenous Guatemalan language, uh, you know, in a Port of Entry.
>> Exactly, excellent.
All right, do we have any more questions? This is—I'm enjoying this conversation, by the way.
>> Oh, good, thank you. I could talk about plain language and language access all day long.
>> Oh, but you'll see, uh, okay, somebody said, "Oh, it was Nic." Nic came out and
actually jumped in and said, AI-powered earbuds for auto language translation, I like it.
>> A universal translator, oh my God.
>> Yeah, it's in the future, we're going to get there.
>> No, no, it exists now, there's a company
selling one that can translate to 132 languages, and, uh, the Google buds,
they came out and one of their selling features was the auto translation piece.
>> Okay, so you know, since nobody else has the question, you know,
I want to know a little bit more about these, says you brought it up, Nic.
>> Yeah, would you mind, Nicshan?
>> How does it work?
>> Yeah, so, you know, everyone's on, on, uh, what is it, those streaming, um, my wife worked for
them, I should remember this, people, um, they talk, right? Yeah, so, TikTok largely uses AI
to auto-translate from various languages to make people's videos available on different platforms.
So that same thing, there are several companies right now that focus on AI-generated language
and auto-translation. So there are a couple of companies that also come out with earbuds,
and if we know anything, if we've been following the earbud market lately,
um, they're being used for three purposes: one is for music, a second one is to work
as non-medical device hearing aids, and the third being for auto-translation.
So you'll start to see that a lot coming out to the market is enhanced features but also, too,
most of you are carrying smart devices, you probably already have two to three
language translators built into your smart device depending on which one you're using.
Microsoft has its own auto-translation, Google has its own auto-translation, and then Apple has
its own auto-translation as well, and those things are often, uh, they're using, we're
sharing machine learning, so they're improving by leaps and bounds almost monthly, it seems.
>> Interesting, that was awesome, awesome. All right, let me see if there's a recording,
see if anybody, uh, is adding any other comments regarding the Google Translate example the Dana
shared. Are folks on the ground capturing those repetitive exchanges to help with informed
content planning? So many opportunities are there. This is from Miss Rodriguez.
>> That is a great idea. I don't know the answer to that question,
but I'm going to go back and find out because we should be doing that.
>> Yeah, excellent, yeah, thumbs up on that one, Karla.
Um, okay, how to go about clearing the technologies in classified spaces?
>> Ah, oh, this is really hard, is this from Alex who asked this question?
>> It is just from a guest, they didn't say who they were.
>> Okay, uh, yeah, this is a real challenge. Uh, I know that, uh, first of all, uh,
you know, SCIFs are not outfitted, and, um, and also, some of the equipment that you could take
in there that is accessible is very old, uh, and so, uh, we have a lot of work to do on that. If
there are folks in this audience who would like to work on that, um, please send me a note,
and let's figure out how to organize that because this is not getting to be a smaller problem,
uh, over time, and, um, yeah, I'm not quite sure how to attack it, so very open to ideas.
>> So, that, that question actually came from Karla Rodriguez. She said,
"Awesome, would be happy to help."
>> Lovely, thank you so much.
>> And then, uh, let's see, Owen couldn't ChatGPT used as a language translator for those
in the field, probably. So, I think that's kind of early in the stages for a ChatGPT,
which is less than a year old, but I'm sure it could be, Owen.
>> Yeah, there are, there are versions out there or APIs that use the engine that do
do translation. There's a whole lot to say about large language models generally, like these are,
uh, basically auto-complete tools, um, that are not smart themselves. Right,
they, they're content generators, they are not truth tellers.
Um, and we think that they're not truth tellers in lots of ways, right, like they do make things up,
um, because they're extrapolating on their algorithm, which is the thing that tells them,
uh, to mimic human conversations. So, uh, there's some interesting
ideas that could come out of whatever is next from ChatGPT, but there are a lot of, uh, as someone
pointed out in the chat, security concerns and issues, uh, containing it from what it is, uh,
actually, um, learning from and sourcing, uh, so you probably get to see experiments over the
next few years, less around translation, and more around, like, customer assistance. So,
um, like virtual assistants will start, um, incorporating large language models
that are trained specifically on a closed set of information,
which could work, but might still make stuff up. I mean, I don't know how you prevent that,
and so there's, there's a lot of work to do there, um, but the Secretary created an AI task force,
uh, and, uh, these kinds of things are, uh, some of what they'll be looking at.
>> Excellent. So, we have one more question from DaShunda McDonley.
Um, how's the department going about collecting internal customer experiences to inform CX goals?
>> Yeah, uh, we're doing a few things. We're leaning heavily on human-centered design methods,
so, uh, you probably will see surveys and questionnaires around, but we are very
keen on learning much more about the lived experience through qualitative research. So,
you may be invited to, uh, to an interview that's confidential between you and somebody on my team,
uh, or, uh, maybe a small group of trusted folks who you're open to having a conversation with,
uh, or, uh, opening up other lines of, uh, communication. But what we really love to do
is field research, where we can go to where you are doing the work that you are doing, so we can
see what it's like, uh, every day. So, if you're disabled, for example, and you are working from
your home office, uh, and, uh, you, we're working on an employee experience that, that you have,
uh, that you work through every day, we might just, like, hang out with you for a few hours and,
um, so you can help us know what that experience is like. I know for my own personal experience,
um, before I joined the federal government, I had the chance to work
on accessibility for a large, uh, financial company, uh, whose name will go unspoken, uh,
that, uh, was really interested in making sure that their new website was accessible
to people with disabilities, and so we went to folks' homes, and, um, the first blind person
who we had as a participant in our study, uh, invited us in, it was really great,
but it was dark in the house and all the lights were turned off, and we sighted people,
and I had to ask to have the voice turned on so we, uh, so we didn't trip over something, and,
um, I think we all learned a lot that day, and, like, there's just no substitute for,
um, actually getting to, um, see what the work is like, see what the context is like, uh, and,
um, live a little bit of that lived experience for a snapshot.
>> 100 percent. So, folks, we are actually at the 2:50 PM mark.
It's just now, Dana, thank you so much, this was great, thank you for being, uh,
very candid and open and just making this more conversational, uh, for myself and everybody
that's on the call. I think it does us great when we have these opportunities to have these
type of conversations and just let ideas flow, because I think that's what it's all about,
having these collaborative moments. If there are not any other questions, we are going to close
out for today with closing remarks by Mr. Nicshan Floyd. Again, Miss Chisnell, thank you so much.
>> Great, thank you so much.
>> All right, so folks, we are going to close out, um, our day one of