What we did

We started by asking: how might we make it easier for identity theft victims to report identity theft to businesses and law enforcement? We used IDEO’s human centered design methods to examine this question. This was our team’s first structured experience using human-centered design. Everyone in the team took turns leading different parts of the process.

Research and Interviews

We reviewed existing research and data, identified key people to talk to, created interview guides, and did 18 interviews.

We interviewed:

identity theft victims
police who assist identity theft victims
federal and state government offices that address identity theft
advocates & legal aid providers
fraud departments at financial institutions
the fraud department at a credit bureau
subject matter experts at the Federal Trade Commission

We also interviewed people in analogous experiences (like police who deal with abuse victims) and went to locations where the victims might report identity theft like police stations and libraries. I led some interviews with victims, advocates, experts, and police.

Analysis and brainstorm

We reviewed our interview notes and research as a team. We pulled out our favorite insights and grouped similar notes together. We continued distilling the information down into questions.

Then, we used the questions to prompt our brainstorm. We had a very productive brainstorm by using some guidelines like: there are no bad ideas and say "yes and". We set a goal of coming up with 20 ideas in 10 minutes for each question. Then, we dot voted for the most actionable idea: improving the identity theft affidavit.

The identity theft affidavit is the form victims use to report identity theft to law enforcement, businesses and the credit bureaus. We heard in the interviews about issues that make the old form difficult to complete and confusing to use.

Prototyping, feedback, development

We developed a paper prototype of the new affidavit and an HTML demo. The new prototype improves the form's credibility, flexibility and authentication.

We are getting feedback from stakeholders and people we interviewed on the new prototype and iterating based on the feedback. Feedback has been positive so far. One stakeholder said, “It’s great that you guys got buy-in from some of the people dealing with this, rather than guessing... [you found] what we actually need.”

We hope to have a new version launched in late 2016.