| The Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) (www.ida.gov.sg) |
eCitizen and My.eCitizen User Experience Discussions & Prototype
Launched in 1999, the eCitizen portal is an initiative owned by the Ministry of Finance (MOF) and managed by IDA. The portal is positioned as the gateway for all government services on the web and organized with the needs of the citizens and customers in mind. The eCitizen portal enables users to search for and access a diversity of information from government agencies, and conduct a wide range of transactions online with government agencies.
My.eCitizen portal, an extension of the eCitizen portal, was launched in July 2002. It allows users to setup SMS and email alerts for a variety of e-services, e.g., renewal of road tax, and select pre-defined profiles that suit the users' needs.
The project intended to gather rich, comprehensive and qualitative information about its potential users, especially their interaction behaviours, relationships and expectations from the eCitizen portal.
Through focus groups and contextual inquiries, detailed expectations of potential users were established and the findings would be used as considerations and contributions to formulate the next phase of the portal development.
Subsequently, the MicroUsability team built prototypes which ensured that the portal's features and functions, design interfaces, usability and interactions be aligned with the users' expectations.
| 1. |
Stakeholder Meetings |
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The MicroUsability team met with IDA project team to ascertain the short and long term project goals, gather information about similar eGovernment websites, find out about marketing issues including branding and portal popularization, and understand the current information archi tecture's rationale as well as how specific website modules like the search engine and My.eCitizen would work. |
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| 2. |
Defined Usability Goals |
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The MicroUsability team defined the qualitative and quantitative usability goals, e.g. to increase online transactions and help users solve problems, to drive the user interface design efforts and set as the usability testing criteria. |
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Established Technical Platform's Capabilities and Constraints |
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The MicroUsability team established the technical platform's capabilities and constraints, e.g., information organization by 'eTowns' as a mandatory requirement. |
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| 4. |
User Profiling |
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The MicroUsability team and IDA project team decided on six user profiles. |
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| 5. |
User Recruitment |
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Based on the user profiles, focus group and contextual inquiry participants were recruited. |
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| 6. |
Conducted Focus Groups |
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About 40 people took part in six focus groups (one for each user profile). Each focus group lasted for about two hours. |
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| 7. |
Conducted Contextual Inquiries |
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A total of 12 people took part in the contextual inquiries. Each contextual inquiry lasted for about an hour. |
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| 8. |
Created Personas |
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Based on the focus group and contextual inquiry data, six personas were created (one for each user profile).
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| 9. |
Designed Conceptual Model, developed Style Guide, and created Prototypes |
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We developed the initial high-level information architecture, user interface design alternatives, navigational pathways and interaction rules. The high-level design ideas and options for functional organization were represented through wireframe prototypes.
The team also designed a style guide that incorporated rules for consistent presentation of tasks, processes and actions, etc.
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| 10. |
Usability Testing and Design Iterations |
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The prototypes were evaluated by the MicroUsability team, and the usability tests began. The conceptual, architectural and visual gaps were analyzed and the prototypes were revised to plug these usability flaws. The prototypes were submitted to IDA project team for review. Using the revised prototypes and style guide, the graphics design and HTML web pages were created. |
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| 11. |
Data Analysis and Reporting |
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Based on the analysis of the focus group, contextual inquiry and usability test data, the MicroUsability team reported its findings and recommendations in a research report. |
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| 12. |
Management Presentation |
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The MicroUsability team gave the stakeholder management a report presentation to explain our findings and recommendations.
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Prototypes, web pages, style guide and research report.
About four months. | 
