Justification for the Non-Substantive Changes to 0960-0828 (IT Mod Change Request)

Justification for Non-Substantive Changes for

Enterprise Scheduling System (ESS)

OMB No. 0960-0828

Revisions to the Information Collection

• Change #1: A telephone number field will persistently display in the customer and technician path. Currently, it only appears if the respondent consents to electronic messaging.

Justification #1: Following the soft launch of ESS, office managers indicate the need to have the phone number associated with appointments to contact respondents if there is an occurrence and the office will not be open, providing the respondent better service and experience. Office managers and development staff agree that this change is a high priority, and needs to be implemented as soon as possible to prevent and mitigate inconvenience to the respondent.

• Change #2: Adding information about text messages and a linked url to our text messaging policy.
  
  Justification #2: Following the soft launch of ESS, we are adding this information to provide further clarity and transparency to the respondent.

• Change #3: ESS will be upgrading the User Experience Framework (UEF) 2.1 to UEF 3.0 in September 2023. When this occurs, the information will be displayed differently, but the content will not change.

• Justification #3: The UEF is the framework that renders the Social Security Administration (SSA) Design System which, in turn, is the official set of standards, styles, and reusable components for SSA Web Applications. A design system is a single source of information which groups standards, styles, and reusable components. The SSA Design System has many facets including patterns, motion, and language. The UEF prototype uses the SSA Design System to ensure consistency across all of our applications. The UEF changes are required within a year of the OMB approval date to reduce the level of effort during product development as we add more screens and functionality. Screen development cannot be done in parallel with migration to UEF 3.0. Therefore, UEF changes need to be completed so that product development can continue and additional features can be delivered.

Terms of Clearance

OMB placed the following Terms of Clearance on this Information Collection when they approved it on 10/13/2022:

As soon as reasonably possible, the agency will conduct a non-substantive change to update the design of the Terms of Service and other disclaimers to simplify the user experience.

SSA Response: We are still evaluating the Terms of Service and other disclaimers in the application. We will continue to review the ESS Terms of Service, make revisions under the Terms of Clearance, and will submit those via Change Request to OMB once we finalize them.

Resubmission within One Year of OMB Approval:

As previously indicated, this is a new Internet scheduling tool and we are accepting usability feedback. As per our future plans in our previous approval, we are submitted a Change Request to show the minor revisions we are making due to received feedback since we implemented the application.