Making digital services more accessible for all — Part 2
Part 2 of 4 of this series focuses on how we experimented with alpha prototypes in designing SingPass Mobile. If you haven’t read Part 1, you can read it here.
Turning vision into reality
Following the initial discovery phase, the team sought the necessary funding to create a proof of concept. The team expanded to include product managers, interaction designers, software engineers and cybersecurity specialists. The project moved into a process of agile design, development and delivery.
Alpha, the first alphabet in the Greek language, is an early release of a product built to test whether it works as intended. Our first alpha prototype focused on enabling a more convenient way of using SingPass 2FA.
This was the most immediate problem to solve because every month, over 150,000 citizens would request to reset their SingPass passwords. This caused frustration to users.
By integrating biometric authentication, citizens would no longer need to remember long passwords, or enter one-time passwords delivered by SMS or physical tokens.
How building alpha prototypes help to uncover blind spots
As product development ramped up, our researchers, designers and adoption & engagement team worked in parallel to get frequent and useful citizen feedback. User input was critical to inform major product design decisions, what stories to add and prioritise in the product backlog, and most importantly, to help us identify any major gap in our design.
In the first half of 2018, the product team released an alpha of the SingPass Mobile app to a targeted group of citizen testers. In addition to more in-depth, one-on-one usability testing, the team experimented with engagement sessions involving larger groups of citizens. Leveraging GovTech’s Tech Kaki community, we invited over 30 citizens of different profiles to get their hands on the product.
Our intention was to simulate how citizens might actually get introduced to SingPass Mobile in the real world; through their friends or colleagues in a social setting. The team wanted to observe group reactions and group dynamics, how people would describe the product to each other, how they might help one another to set up the app, and where they would get stuck.
Two significant blind spots emerged from our alpha testing:
i. Are we testing enough in real-life conditions?
When testing under research conditions — engaging with people one-on-one, using a test phone with the app pre-installed, logging in with dummy SingPass account — usability wasn’t an issue. However, during the Tech Kaki session, where conditions were closer to real life (a noisy room with lots of people and distractions all around), problems started to surface. For example, some users would miss the app notification and would not be able to find it again. Things that felt fine in the lab were now confusing. What we learnt was in the context of designing digital identity services. We have to let users test the alpha app on their own smartphones, use their own accounts, and see their own data, in order to truly understand if the user experience is good.
ii. Are we evaluating how inclusive our user experiences are?
We observed that some elderly citizens were taking a long time to complete the tasks we set them. This was not because they didn’t understand what to do, nor was it because of the in-app text being too small. It was because text input on a smartphone gets harder as you get older. Seniors lose dexterity in their fingers when they age, and it becomes more difficult to move them with the precision needed to hit tiny buttons, especially on a small on-screen keyboard. This was a pain point for elderly users.
If we took only an outcome-based view on evaluating the user experience, perhaps the alpha design was good enough. Elderly users could still complete the necessary tasks, if they dedicate more time and focus. However, it was clear to the team that there was an opportunity to raise the bar and design a more inclusive user experience. Though not everyone has the same hand-eye coordination or finger dexterity issues, we knew solving this pain point could unlock benefits to mainstream user groups and use cases. For example, it would make it easier for people who only have one hand free (say if their other hand is holding something else), or those who need to complete a digital transaction in a hurry.
Experimenting with alternative interaction patterns
The team had already been experimenting with using QR login as an alternative experience. We previewed this new feature with our alpha testers and received an overwhelmingly positive response, especially from more elderly participants. Why? Aside from QR codes being more common place and accepted because of its adoption for other digital services, the action of holding up their phones to scan a code is significantly easier for anyone with limited motor skills to accomplish.
“It’s easier to just hold up my phone to scan the QR code, compared to typing on the screen.”
As soon as a new alpha prototype with the QR login feature was available for testing, the team was back in the field engaging with users, to help us further refine the user experience and product functionality.
Building on what we learnt from Tech Kaki, the team focused our next round of testing with citizens who were more likely to struggle (elderly users), citizens with the highest expectations (power users), and citizens who use government services rarely but at important life moments (overseas users). Their positive feedback gave us strong evidence that this was the right interaction pattern to move forward with. We also explored the strategic use of animation to make it easier for people to know what to do at just a glance, without needing to read a lot of text.
Slowing down to speed up
The value of experimenting with different potential solutions, before charging into implementation, cannot be stated highly enough. We cannot know for sure what is best for users until we test our hypotheses and assumptions with them. By being open to ideas, we could identify better solutions and correct the course early. The resulting product design and strong user validation gave the team and our stakeholders the confidence to move forward to the next phase — to invest in building a beta product to test at scale with public officers, and with the general public.
To find out more about how we tested at scale and what we learned from the experience, check out Part 3 of the SingPass Mobile product design journey.
