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Ministry of Trade and Industry (MTI)
Usability Evaluation of Government-to-Business (G2B) and Licensing Portal
Business.gov.sg, a one-stop portal developed by MTI together with 30 government agencies, aims to help businesses interact and transact with the government in a seamless and hassle-free manner.
The portal provides a comprehensive suite of information and services to businesses, ranging from registering a business, applying for licences, looking for financing schemes, conducting market research and more.
Budding Entrepreneurs can also download the Entrepreneurs' Guide that walks through the process of starting and running a business.
The objectives were to identify the usability issues as well as the gaps between the public's expectations and the government's delivery of the portal.
The MicroUsability team conducted usability evaluations on the G2B portal and the Licensing Portal.
From the study, the team has proposed the following areas of improvement:
1. The Government-to-Business section -
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Organisation |
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For example, consider organising the topics in terms of different stages of the business lifecycle. |
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Labelling and links |
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For example, use of familiar keywords to create intuitive links. The appearances of the links need to be consistent. |
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Layout design |
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For example, emphasise the important information, and tone down the less important information. |
2. The Licensing section -
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Information Classification |
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For example, provide multiple ways to search for a licence, e.g., company types and life stages. Instead of using the internal licence organisation, the licence classification needs to be user-centric. |
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Grouping |
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For example, separate the industry hyperlinks (e.g., fishing) and business activity hyperlinks (e.g., wholesale and retail trade) into different groups. |
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Search |
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For example, the search engine needs to support multiple queries that lead to the same record. To achieve this, the content needs to be systematically indexed to include thesaurus of synonymous queries and relevant keywords. If no research result is found, reasons and hints can be provided. |
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Navigation |
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For example, icons should not be ambiguous.
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Copywriting |
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For example, use the user's language for labelling, and do not use redundant words. |
Based on the usability test data, some of the recommendations were:
- Increase the navigation menu's font point size.
- Make the logo look like a clickable image, so that a user can click on the logo to return to the portal's homepage.
- Provide assistance if no search result is found.
- Use plain English when explaining the licences and labelling the input fields.
- Display the licence applications' basic information upfront, e.g., SingPass is compulsory and all the payment options.
- Store user's information, e.g., address, so that he/she does not need to provide the same information repeatedly.
Microusability has helped us identify the key usability issues of our portal and improve its overall quality.
Usability Evaluation Report
About three months.
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