Why did we build BEBO?

Since the start of the COVID-19 crisis, an unprecedented number of people have been trying to navigate the unemployment system. Many have found the experience frustrating. With millions of newly unemployed people seeking benefit information at the same time, the system is understandably overloaded. Information available online can be confusing, and it is difficult to reach agents by phone. Just a simple social media search shows the frustration of people in getting the right help.

Of the millions of jobs that have been lost in this crisis, the majority were held by women. In certain industry sectors women have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19 related job losses. Women of color, immigrants, caretakers, single moms, and non-native English speakers have been particularly impacted.

We built BEBO to help direct people toward useful resources and to ease the application process. To address the complexity of this issue, our research team spent hours going through personal stories of people to identify the pain points in the process. We developed several profiles of people to understand better how we could personalize and direct the appropriate answers. Each profile involved developing several decision trees such as the flowchart shown below, which goes through different loops and branches to find out the right solution for the user.

We hope this bot will help those in our community who are most vulnerable to get the answers they need. We also envision expanding BEBO in the future to include:

• Richer content, to answer more questions and with more detail
• Information for other states besides California
• More information about related services, such as job hunt tools or legal resources