Biz Portal
Project Type
Design Strategy
​
User Interview, User Workshop Survey, Product Concept, Product Roadmap, Low Fidelity Prototype, Usability Testing
Industry
Digital Government
Duration
4 months
Role
Lead Researcher​
Lead 2 analysts, Set Approach & Analysis Framework, Set Project Plan, Give Direction & feedback, Facilitate Workshops & Focus Groups, Design & Analyse Surveys, Propose Features, Present Findings
Background
Starting a business in Thailand was difficult, costing businesses time, money, and frustration. Thai government wanted to improve the ease of doing business through a one-stop service platform. The client engaged us to design the platform features and services.
Project Outcome
Informed Design Decision
Based on user insights, my team and I proposed 5 key concepts: Smart Quiz, Smart Form, Smart Doc, Smart Track, Smart Permit - which led to a high-fidelity design and platform development.
Improved Ranking
Each year, World Bank measures the ease of doing business in 190 countries. The development of Biz Portal partially contributed to Thailand’s Ease of Doing Business ranking, which increased from 48th to 26th in 2016 – 17
Saved Time & Effort
Biz Portal reduced 59% of documents and 42% of information filling that businesses need to prepare (based on opening a restaurant process.)
Scaled to New Services
The services available scaled from 12 to 94 permits - in alignment with the roadmap proposed. The success of Biz Portal led to the design and development of Citizen Portal
Research Goals
-
Understand Thai business owners' and government officers' expectations toward digital services
-
Develop platform concept
-
Assess service impact and readiness to develop the service roadmap
-
Recommend suitable system architecture for the Thai context
-
Recommend suitable operating model
Role & Responsibilities
Research Workstream Lead. My key responsibilities include:
-
Set project approach, analysis framework and research plan
-
Lead a team of 2 analysts to develop high-quality output
-
Co-facilitate focus groups with 60 business owners
-
Co-facilitate 2 workshops with 80 government agencies
-
Design survey and analyze data for 389 government services
-
Develop product strategy, goals, and vision
-
Propose platform features and services as a design guideline
Process
User Research
Online government service? No way.
Originally, I planned to conduct in-depth interview with business owners to understand their challenges and expectations towards obtaining business licenses. But back in 2016, people were not as digitally adept as today and red tapes in governments made people skeptical about the feasibility of the platform. So instead of interviewing to understand expectations, my project director and I proposed that jumping to test the product concept would be a better alternative given the current context. The concept would help people realize that the platform can be done and seeing their reaction to it would be a great way to draw insights.
To come up with the early product concept for testing, we conducted 4 key things:
-
Task Analysis to understand the processes business owners need to go through to set up a company
-
Experience Mapping to replicate and understand their journey and experiences when contacting each government agency (similar to Walk-a–Mile Immersion)
-
Document Analysis to understand the documents and information they have to prepare
-
Competitive Analysis to compare and contrast what other governments are doing to improve business licensing experience
User Insights & Conceptualization No. 1
Confusion from complex conditions
Task analysis revealed that there are many "if this, then that" conditions written in legal or obscure languages that confuse business owners.
For example, if businesses wanted to set up a building/ factory, they have to go through multiple processes. For one permit, they had to choose Factor Type 1, Type 2, or Type 3 - yes that's the actual name and no, businesses didn't know what they mean and had to find additional information on their own.
4 agencies and 5 permits to open a restaurant
The earlier example is the case for businesses that know which permits they need to get. But oftentimes, businesses actually don't know which permits they need.
​
With the example of opening a restaurant, businesses had to contact 4 government agencies to apply for a minimum of 5 permits - one of them is called Operation Permit for Health Hazardous Business which seemed highly irrelevant.
Meet "Smart Quiz"
While some businesses can outsource or set up a department solely for government relations, not every business can afford to do the same. Instead of educating businesses so that they understand complex permit systems, or enforcing a government-wide naming convention that involves multiple legislation amendments, we introduced "Smart Quiz."
​
Businesses can answer simple questions about their business such as Will you sell alcoholic beverages? Will you sell cigarettes? Will you renovate the building? then the system will generate a list of permits to apply.
User Insights & Conceptualization No. 2
Document preparation is a pain
After contacting multiple government agencies pretending to set up a business, mapping out the experience, and validating with businesses, we found that preparing documents is consistently one of the most painful processes for businesses.
Then we analyzed the required documents for each process to understand what's gruesome about document preparation and we found out that:
-
Businesses need to submit 31 - 67 supporting documents
-
Businesses need to fill 5 - 41 application forms
Multiple copies of the same thing
We dug deeper into the documents and application forms and we realized that there were a lot of duplications - the same documents, the same information but sent to different agencies.
Meet "Smart Doc" and "Smart Form"
After realizing that businesses had to prepare multiple of the same documents - mostly issued by the government - and again, amending the legislation to cut down documents would be time-consuming, we designed "Smart Doc" and "Smart Form" features that can retrieve information from a central repository. While these are common practices today, but back in 2016, it was a highly innovative way to work around the red tape in the public sector.
