Designing an agnostic assistance finder
Background
In recent years Australia has been hit with disasters and crises with so far unseen severity. Currently NSW residents are suffering from the affects of bushfires, COVID-19 and droughts. To date each crisis was dealt with individually in order to get support and information to the public.
The challenge
- Build an assistance finder that can be applied to any crisis to inform the public about available support before the event.
- Allow NSW state government to quickly respond and get support to customers in need, regardless of what disaster or crisis they may be facing.
- Work in a COVID-19 safe environment. All meetings, workshops, user research and user testing was done from remote using tools such as Miro, Teams, Zoom, Slack, Axure and Invision.
Discovery
There are currently three assistance finders on Service NSW’s platform. These were introduced to support people affected by bushfires, COVID-19 and to help with cost of living.
Desktop research led to other government assistance finders and assistance finders in the private sector.
User research
- 10 participants with various crises backgrounds were recruited using a variety of sources and channels. Due to the nature of the project this was a difficult and high-risk task.
- Participants were interviewed individually to find out about how they were affected by each individual crisis, how they would inform about available support and their pain points and needs along their journeys.
Key insights
- Revealed what customers would expect from councils, state and federal government in times of a crisis.
- How customers would obtain information about support.
- How customers would use map based services for example to make business decisions before a drought or their experience with bushfire maps.
- Preference of communicating with government services at various times throughout a crisis.
User journey maps and personas
Verbatim from interviews led to creating personas and user journey maps to be able to follow users’ experiences before, during and after a disaster or crisis to then match this against current and future Service NSW’s service offering.
User testing
An agnostic finder prototype (password: support) was created to test all hypothetical functionality that may be added in future releases as well as functionality from current live assistant finders as tracking and testing data for existing finders was insufficiently available.
6 participants of which 4 were 55+ years of age were asked about their experience using the agnostic assistance finder prototype.
Results
Trends surfaced about 20 individual items to be optimised, ranging from simplifying wording to removing entire sections and functionality to reduce friction.
A vision piece for the agnostic finder could now be designed with confidence to be used in subsequent user tests and to be rolled out in a lean process.
