Case exercise

In this case exercise, I was asked to choose a problem to solve for public good.

The requirements for the case are as follows:

• What are the problem(s) you want to solve in this domain?

• What are your product’s features?

• What will users experience, and why were those design choices made?

• How would you start, launch and roll out your product? 

• How would you measure success?

• What is your product’s long term vision?

This has to be done within 2 pages.

My process

Brainstorm and select user problems

For this exercise, I dug deep and thought about the hurdles I faced as a middle-class Singaporean. After brainstorming, the specific problem I selected was that residents face difficulty in locating and understanding the information they need.

This came to me as I experienced difficulty as a Singapore resident, trying to understand and utilize the benefits of being a resident as well as what the best course of action in certain situations. Some examples include:

• Understanding how our Central Provident Fund ("CPF") can help with tax benefits;

• Understanding the grants I get as a Singaporean with regards to public housing; and

• Understanding GST implications when crossing customs.

I also know that there are different users that encounter this problem, having had to help the elderly with their online applications and finding information. However, for this case, I decided to focus on the average Singaporean resident and assume that they were digital natives that know how to google and attempt to self-serve.

Diving deeper into these situations, I broke down and sized specific problems from the overall issue:

• A resident may not know the relevant agencies for their specific issue.

• They may not be able to find the information on an agency website.

• They may have to aggregate information from different agency websites to properly understand the fuller picture.

I spoke with people within my circle on the above to validate my thoughts and assumptions. On a high level, most people agreed.

Document user requirements

The solution I wanted to build had to address these problems. Based on the issues faced, I created specific user requirements for the product solution.

The product must be:

• unified (i.e. the information must be consolidated from the different agencies);

• consistent (i.e. the information must be written/displayed in a similar fashion and organized in a similar way); and

• easy to navigate (i.e. the user must find the interface easy and intuitive to use).

Brainstorm and select product for case

From these product requirements, I brainstormed and narrowed down the potential products to the following:

• ChatGPT for residents that specializes in Singapore's policies

• Platform for live webinars with experts answering questions live

• Agency-agnostic support form (no back and forth with different agencies)

• A single personalized newsletter sent based on user's data and events (e.g. share benefits available specifically to a resident, recommend optional actions that can help benefit a resident)

• A unified knowledge base with articles agnostic of agency

Because many of these products are advanced, the last product above is the best for a MVP concept. Further to that, some of the other products/services require a pool of reliable content to consume to provide accurate answers. The unified KB can be their starting point.

S/N: while researching this product, I found that the UK government has already done this to great success: GOV.UK wins design of the year.

Document feature requirements

I broke down the idea of a knowledge base into the following:

• Content

  • Style guide for consistency

  • Information architecture (i.e. how the content will be categorized)

  • Scope to ensure the articles are appropriate for the platform

• Front end

  • Home page

  • Search bar

  • Breadcrumb navigation

  • Related articles

  • Feedback form

• Back end

  • Analytics to track user behavior

  • Database to collect feedback

  • Search to help users find the articles they are looking for

I expanded on each in my rough draft, including why the feature should be prioritized and the high-level requirements for the feature.

Wireframes

I then made some wireframes for easier visualization.

You can see more in the Results section.

Plan the project

Based on the product and its features, I started to plan the steps needed surrounding the project. This included the following.

Direct first steps

First, we need to speak with agencies to see who would allow us to use their content, consume it, and redo it in our format and style guide.

Once we have content to test, we need to work on a few articles and put it on a prototype to test the design with users.

Once the front end design is tested, we can start building out the simple front end, along with the articles we have.

Because this is a proof of concept to convince any other agencies to let us consume and include their content, I also planned out specific success metrics that should not be too difficult to implement:

• Helpfulness score: the ratio between Yes and No in the feedback forms.

• Traffic: sessions, unique visitors, page views, referral sources, search query, time on page.

• Search metrics: average number of searches, searches with no results.

Next steps

Once we have more agencies onboard, the next steps for the product would include:

• Content management system: to allow agency writers to create, edit, and publish their articles.

• Migration project: to migrate the content to our platform, taking into account the style guide for consistency.

New success metrics would include for this specific part:

• Migration rate: number of articles migrated from existing agencies to the new website.

• Publish/update activity: number of new articles published and existing articles updated.

• Forms submitted or requests made: users who took action on their issues via the website.

Once this is implemented and gets traction, we can consider building out other products, such as a unified support form to place on the site and an ChatGPT that can answer residents based on the content in the KB.

Results

After all this work, I had about 5 pages of information. I got feedback from friends and family and ruthlessly cut the content down to 2 pages. You can download the final results below.