Chris Walker

One cool project

I've been project managing the latest update to our Foodstamp Manager software on and off over the last few weeks. This project is almost three years old now, and I'm very proud to be a part of it.

It was determined that the New York City population was under-enrolled in the federal Food Stamp program to a significant extent. To help remedy this, the Food Card Access Project (FCAP) was created. FCAP receives state funding from New York to help ensure that: a.) the hungry are getting the benefits to which they are entitled, and b.) those federal dollars are flowing to the places where they are needed.

The United Way of New York City oversees and administers the Project. FoodChange (formerly the Community Food Resource Center) is the training and education partner and one of the main Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) involved. The Chinese-American Planning Council, Harlem Congregations for Community Improvement, the Ridgewood-Bushwick Senior Citizen's Council, Sunnyside Community Services, Citizen's Advice Bureau, and Food Force (including FoodChange) are the other CBOs. The Urban Justice Center also assists with Advocacy and Research.

The software, as spec'ed by FoodChange (primarily) and developed by Mission Research, allows case workers to go out to soup kitchens, food pantries, WIC sites (read: where the hungry people are) and sit down with people to quickly and accurately determine their eligibility for Food Stamps. The questionnaires are designed so that the most pertinent questions (resources, income) are at the front so a determination of eligibility can be made in just a few minutes. Then, if a client is found likely to be eligible, s/he can spend some more time with the screener and provide more information. All of the screening information is stored locally (offline) on the screener's laptop, and then s/he eventually returns to the office, and synchronizes the information to to a centralized database. The calculator (Foodstamp Manager) can then print off a filled-in paper application, which the applicant can take to the assistance center to submit. The calculator data is ready and waiting to be submitted electronically as soon as the state agency that oversees the program is ready to receive it that way.

To date, over 40,000 households have been screened through the Foodstamp Manager, representing over 100,000 total people. More than half are found to be eligible for foodstamps, and a large number of those have gone through the complete process and enrolled in the program.

This latest update to the software will give the organizations greater ability to do case management and to track the clients through to either receipt of their benefits or verified ineligibility. It also will give better tools to the advocates - the ones that are monitoring and making sure that those who are eligible are receiving the full benefits to which they are entitled.

It's exciting to do a (small) part of the work to help this great program that helps so many.

Thinking about design...

In our attempts to make GiftWorks easy to use and intuitive, we have lots of discussions and spend lots of time thinking about the design. Sarah (GiftWorks' product manager) recently loaned me a fantastic book about design called The Design of Everyday Things, which I've been reading at night before bed (and with which I'm almost done). It's a great book about design psychology and all sorts of interesting concepts like affordances and constraints. And it's very generic: it discusses the design of everything from doors to telephones to lego motorcycles. There is very little about software (it was originally written in the mid-80's) and certainly very little that directly applies to today's software technologies, but all of the core principles are very relevant, and it's refreshing to think about GiftWorks, and what we're trying to do here, in a new light.

Coincidentally (and concurrently, even), Joel Spolsky (of Joel On Software fame) is doing a series of posts that will eventually become a book titled Great Design. It has many of the same concepts as the Everyday Things book, but is a little more current and relevant to software design.

All of this great information about design is bouncing around in my head, and, as we start to really plot out some of the Next Big Things (Gabriel, GiftWorks 2007, etc.) I have a renewed zeal for trying to get it right. It's good to have zeal, too, because getting it right is very hard!