Digital transformation for government services
URIS is a system that enables companies to manage government services online, greatly improving on the existing process.
Problem statement
Currently, the existing process for professionals is very confusing and requires hiring an accountant to manage this part of their business. It is not possible to due most of the existing government services online.
Context
The client is going through a digital transformation using web technologies to improve existing systems and processes for customers and employees.
A secondary priority was to develop an employee admin portal with integrations to different systems to have a single point to access and service client requests.
As the only designer, I established an iterative feedback process, facilitated requirement workshops, created prototypes, led user testing efforts and designed the system.
It takes time and effort to learn which documents you need in which cases. One of the most frequent support questions has been about finding the correct documents for everyday people
Challenges
A fixed deadline limited the scope of analysis, research and user validation I could do.
Using the IBM Carbon design system was convenient but didn’t allow for flexibility when it came to aesthetics.
Working on 3 project phases in parallel.
Team
A remote cross-functional consultant team consisting of analysts, managers and engineers working directly with the client.
Customer portal
Digitally sign documents
Users would choose from a list of services that are available to the specific user. Submitting the wrong documents is no longer possible!
Service Catalogue
All required documents for the selected services will appear here as downloadable templates.
Admin portal
Submission issues at a glance
What was a manual process has been automated by using a rule engine that scans through all submissions for inaccuracies.
Streamlined verdict manager
Decreased submission processing time by adding verdict templates and better recipient management.
The problem space
Learning about the desired system’s workflow from experts to understand the user journeys for different departments.
I facilitated recurring stakeholder and expert workshops to gather requirements, feedback, learn about the flexibility of changing any existing process to a more efficient one.
User journeys
Because nobody knew how the final system should work, we decided to start with a simple happy path and build from then.
This way we could start from the same understanding and context and build product knowledge together from here. It was very useful to have different departments represented from the start.
Sometimes a user action would branch out into an independent flow with different goals.
Companies that have subsidiaries would have a completely different set of rules to manage. They required extra features like switching between subsidiaries and applying rules to a selection.
Different levels of fidelity help progressively build a shared understanding about the ins and outs of business processes and use cases.
Once people are proficient in navigating the product, technical limitations and edge cases tend to arise and need to be worked through.
This high-level view diagram helped us contextualise the system in its entirety.
Zooming out to show a conceptual diagram of how data will flow through the entry point of the client portal, through the different interconnected systems, going through the administration layer and in the end changes to the company are live in the real world.
Information Architecture
A system emerges over time.
It is useful to visualise how information and product areas are structured in the portal. This helps with better understand the scope of the system and enabled many crucial discussions.
Over time with more iterations, a more detailed version of the site structure is emerges.
Continuous feedback
Continuously sharing new iterations of screens to establish a feedback loop
This helped the client to better understand how the design process works. Seeing design changes based on feedback creates more ownership on all sides.
User testing
Most users had little to no problems completing tasks.
This chart shows how many times the users got lost at any point during testing. A score of 1 is a perfect score where the user was not confused once.
The post-test survey showed that the users were mostly satisfied with the new system and thought that the available functionality is enough to improve their workflows.
Final thoughts
The customer portal has received early positive feedback from users which means it is a step in the right direction.
Improvements to all systems are necessary and more edge cases will be discovered as the system is used by more people.
As the organisation’s digital transformation continues, the portal and surrounding systems will come closer to realising the goal of being self-service portals where the review process doesn’t require people but is handled by automation. This would greatly improve efficiency.
More research needs to be done to gather feedback from more people to understand how the system can evolve to serve the user better.
One of the current limitations of designing these types of systems is the complexity of changing an internal government process to improve the user experience of the system.