Creating a digital front door for citizens
Client
Australian State Government
Services
Strategic Design, Design Research, Service Design, Customer Experience, Product Design
Industry
Government & Public Sector
Year
2022
Impact
Allowing Australian citizens to have intuitive, high-quality digital interactions with Government services removes barriers to access, increases trust and reduces frustration associated with a negative customer experience.
Suddenly moving to a single ‘digital front door’ for government services is challenging for citizens and businesses to understand and for departmental agencies to endorse. Instead, Symplicit created a design strategy building upon a fragmented digital infrastructure to create a ‘single front door’ presentation for customers, taking a “’ live in the house whilst you renovate’ approach.
Value
Our roadmap of features and milestones helped our client make a case for its digital transformation. We use the analogy of a ‘front door’ and ‘rooms’ to highlight each service’s value for citizens and ensure that as the relationship between governments and citizens changes, services assistance and service channels remain relevant and accessible.
In doing so, Symplicit helped our client to embrace change and create a shared vision for the future. Symplicit’s recommendations envisage moving towards robust digital infrastructure while giving every citizen the services they need to live well.
Process
Symplicit’s approach, co-developed with the client, was to create a robust “backstage” digital infrastructure while maintaining existing services. We assessed the service ecosystem already in place and acknowledged its richness, complexity, and barriers to implementation. For example, the intersection of trust, security, digital inclusion, and legislation means a lot of deep policy work is needed before the ‘front door’ can fully express itself.
We started our design process with paper prototypes to get rich feedback on our early ideas before becoming too committed. We built upon the ideas that received positive feedback as we learned what worked, ensuring that all our work was grounded.
Mindset
Our most important value for this project was co-design with stakeholders and citizens: everything we did was in close collaboration. Our investigation, design and advisory process involved our primary stakeholders and an extensive network of dynamic Government employees.