OneService

Empowering residents to improve and engage their neighbourhoods

Overview

OneService is a platform of the Singapore government's Municipal Services Office (MSO). Launched in January 2015, it aims to provide residents with an easy and convenient way to report municipal issues in their neighbourhoods. The platform addresses a problem where residents were previously unsure of the appropriate government agency to report a particular municipal issue to.

In this project, I worked as part of a five-person team to redesign and propose improvements to the OneService mobile application to benefit over 60,000 registered users.

Period & Timeframe

August — November 2016

Skills

UX Design, UI Design, Visual Design

Tools

Pen & Paper, Sketch, Photoshop, InVision

Research

We conducted qualitative interviews and competitor analyses of similar products to better understand OneService users. OneService targets newlyweds in their twenties and thirties and middle-aged residents, as research has found that they tend to be more civic-minded and invested in their neighbourhood as home-owners.

Interviews, Personas & Competitor Analyses

We conducted qualitative interviews with 12 individuals in our target audience. During the interviews, they were asked to report a municipal issue on the app, and search for municipal issues in their neighbourhood. From our interview data, we also created two personas to get a clearer sense of their problems, goals, needs and characteristics. We also conducted competitor analyses of similar products to discover learning points that can be translated to improvements for OneService.

Pain Points

Our research yielded valuable insights into the attitudes and behaviours of our target users, and we concluded our study by uncovering six main pain points that they faced while using the current OneService mobile app.

  1. Cannot control how they receive updates from authorities
  2. Hard to identify the features they are looking for
  3. Reporting an issue is inefficient with too much information to process
  4. Unfamiliar with municipal issues around the neighbourhood
  5. Unable to report the issue at a more convenient time
  6. Reporting issues is stressful because they cannot be amended

Design

Conceptual sketches of our redesign

Keeping the pain points of our users and the learning points from our competitive analyses in mind, we redesigned and proposed improvements to the OneService app through an iterative design process. At the end of each iteration, we approached our users for feedback on how we could improve the user experience of the app.

OneService at a glance

Previous Home Page
Redesigned Home Page

Previously, users jumped straight into reporting a case upon opening the OneService app. Our improved experience includes a thorough redesign of the home screen, and all the features are now at the forefront. We hoped to help users to understand what they can do with the app at a glance. This ties in with the term ‘OneService’ – all its services are now accessible with a single tap.

Reporting an issue

Previous 'Submit New Case' Page
Redesigned 'Submit New Case' Page

We decided to simplify the categories users choose from when reporting an issue. We found that categories provide a mental framework for reporting, but at the same time do not wish to overwhelm users with too many choices.

We introduced a ‘Save as Draft’ feature for users who wish to report it at a more convenient time. Saving drafts also allows for greater accuracy and reversibility of mistakes, as users can edit and submit drafts at their own pace.

Previous 'Case Submitted' Page
New 'Confirm Submission' Page

We have also allowed users to confirm their report details before sending it to the authorities. It gives them an opportunity to proofread and edit their submission so that they have more control over their mistakes.

Following up with users ensures that they receive adequate feedback and affirmation that their reports have been taken into consideration. Also, by allowing users to control how they wish to receive updates, they need not find themselves receiving unnecessary or unsolicited phone calls.

Knowing about the neighbourhood

We introduced a 'Search Cases' feature with a comprehensive search mechanism. The keyword, location and category search parameters work together to provide targeted search results and encourage exploration.

By allowing users to view follow and track cases, efficiency is improved. Users do not have to waste time and effort reporting issues that have been submitted, and they can simply follow the submitted case. On the other hand, authorities will not have to deal with a backlog of duplicated reports.

Evaluation & Feedback

Using CogTool, a program that evaluates how quickly a user can accomplish a task on a prototype, we found our redesigned task flow of reporting an issue to be at least 10% faster than the original. Our users also expressed satisfaction with our improved app, stating that the redesign gave them a better sense of what they can achieve with OneService. They were also visibly more confident when reporting an issue.

If we were given the opportunity to improve the OneService app with another design iteration, we would also consider:

  1. Displaying report analytics to encourage accountability to the municipal issues being reported, such as number of cases submitted, number of cases resolved and average response times.
  2. Introducing a feed of submitted cases in the user's vicinity to provide an integrated experience where they can be more aware of issues that are happening around them.

Prototype

Thanks for reading! Click on the link below to try our interactive prototype.

View Prototype