Citizen Portal
Output &
Design Strategy
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Large-scale User Interview, Large-scale User Workshop, Rapid Prototyping, Concept Testing
Industry
Digital Government
Duration
6 months
Role
Lead Researcher​
Mentor 5 analysts, Set Approach & Analysis Framework, Set Project Plan, Give Direction & feedback, Conduct Daily Debriefing Sessions, Facilitate Workshops, Present Findings
Background
COVID-19 catalyzed digital adoption for Thais across all ages. As citizens became more digitally advanced, the government was forced to deliver a better service experience.
The client wanted to create a digital one-stop service platform and engaged us to design it.
Project Outcome
Research Goals
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Understand Thai citizen's expectations toward digital government service
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Develop platform concept
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Design key features and develop feature roadmap
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Assess service impact and readiness to develop the service roadmap
Role & Responsibilities
Project Lead. My key responsibilities include:
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Prepare and pitch proposal against 4 vendors
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Set project approach, analysis framework, and project plan
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Lead a team of 5 analysts to develop high-quality output
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Manage the team to interview 400 Thais in 1 month
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Manage the team to survey 73 government agencies to assess 230 services
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Facilitate workshops with 19 government agencies to assess 145 services
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Present key findings to the client
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Lead the team to organize a public hearing event with 150 participants
Process
User Research
Asked to conduct 400 Interviews in 1 month
Conducting 400 interviews in 1 month is a pre-defined scope and timeline set by the client. Changing the methodology was not an option. I planned the interview schedule with the end in mind and decided to make a tradeoff between breadth and depth.
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Based on the research goal of understanding how people want to interact with governments, I set the interview template (as an interview guideline for the team and to ensure the results can be comparable for analysis) by focusing on 3 key areas:
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Top-of-mind services to analyze how frequently each service is mentioned
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Service satisfaction to analyze the sentiment of people using those services
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Current challenges to understand other obstacles or expectations in receiving digital service
How to recruit?
My team and I recruited the interviewees by ourselves due to time and budget constraints. We proposed to interview ~30 samples for 13 target groups and identified key hubs of recruitment for each group. The hubs we selected were mostly clubs and associations that aim to improve the livelihood of their members/ customers in each region. Because of the aligned goals, the hubs showed great cooperation by referring several members to participate in exchange for the high-level interview summary.
User Insights
People don't understand "government service"
When asked "what government services do you typically use?," majority of people had a hard time understanding the question. But when we paraphased to "when was the last time you contact government agencies and what did you do?," they can answer right away.
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We noted down the terms people use to refer to services and concluded that there are 8 types of services that should be incorporated in the design decision.
We found that people associated the term "service" with hospitality, ease, and convenience such as going to hotels or spas but contacting the government was for compliance. To change these perceptions, we synthesized our findings and proposed 6 design guiding principles for better government service delivery.
Service Readiness Scan
Selecting high-impact services
If we can include all 2,000 citizen services into the platform at once, that would be ideal. But not all government services are digitally ready - some only offer onsite/ paper service, some have digital service but customer-facing portal only, some have both front-end and back-end, while some use predictive analytics to provide services.
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With different levels of readiness combined with time and budget constraints, the client asked us to develop a 3-year service roadmap. To select the services, we shortlisted 375 services and then assessed their impact and readiness - 230 services by online survey and 145 high-priority services by focus group.
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Even though the approach and level of detail are different from the 2 methods, we had to combine and compare both results to prioritize the services. Hence, I set standard service readiness framework by analyzing 3 key areas:
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Willingness to Integrate
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Digital Service Readiness
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Obstacles for Integration
Then we prioritize the survey and focus group responses by Service Readiness with Service Impact into 3 phases.
Conceptualization & Concept Test
Turning issues to features
The client has specified that the solution should be a digital platform but open to both a desktop website and a mobile app. To design the To-Be Capabilities or features, we identified 8 key touchpoints and did affinity clustering for the issues then mapped the issues with potential solutions.
Designing the platform
From 61 potential features, we removed duplicates, rationalize based on citizens' voices and technological readiness, we proposed the platform concept, information architecture, and feature roadmap.
Testing the concept with 153 participants
Concept testing was a half-day event with 153 participants onsite and people at home watching the live broadcast on YouTube. The participants were government agencies that will use the platform and the hubs of people we contacted earlier for interview recruitment.
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The client executive and my project director presented the product concept then I led the concept testing sessions. We divided participants into 10 groups with 1 - 2 moderators per group. I was the main conductor of the session.
