Beyond ‘roads, rates and rubbish’: How a UX-first approach transforms digital government services

Beyond “roads, rates and rubbish” - a common phrase used in Australia to describe the role of the local governments, the City of Sydney is pushing the limits of what local councils can do for its people.

Speaking to GovInsider, the city council’s Chief Technology and Digital Services Officer, Tom Gao, says the council wants to improve the online citizen experience, as well as inform the community of its wider range of offerings and services.

These factors drove his team to relook at the council's digital strategy.

The CityConnect ecosystem, launched last April, was one of the projects that was launched to tackle some key challenges around existing online services.

CityConnect is a centralised dashboard that allows residents to submit, track and manage their service requests that are automatically routed to internal units that are in charge.

In just over six months, the council digitised (and redesigned the experience of some of its) 85 services and has since processed more than 170,000 service requests via the digital channel.

To date, Gao shares that there are over 200,000 residents on the platform.

BETTER Future Awards, which is the world's largest network of design awards, reported that in the 24 hours of the platform going live, approximately 4,000 individuals successfully complete their migration and log in to the new experience.

The success garnered through the public buy-in would have been challenging previously.

Before the revamped digital strategy, only 30 out of over 200 services were made online and residents expressed frustration and hesitance about using these services.

“It’s hopeless, but it’s what I’ve come to expect with government, they don’t know their right hand from their left and it shows when you’re on any (government) website,” one community member said during the initial user research process.

What changed? Gao shares that optimising current processes for users – be it citizens or civil servants – is key to designing good digital government services.

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Taking a backstep

He notes that instead of focusing on digitising more services, the council spent five years on the user research process, which involved interviews and surveys done with over 1,000 residents to pinpoint shortcomings in public service delivery.

Gao distills the findings down to three key aspects for improvement when it comes to digital government services.

The first is to create a consistent online experience for users; second to keep all online transactions with different agencies in one place; and third to increase awareness of the city's services.

The work of CityConnect is also not done by the IT team alone, but a multi-disciplinary team with cross-functional representatives from the technology, business, and customer service units.

The improvements were later made on the corporate website which was redesigned in 2020 and with the new CityConnect ecosystem.

User experience at the onset

The findings reveal a design challenge, and so a human-centred design and design thinking methodologies have been adopted at the outset of this project to address the shortcomings.

“There’s never an organisation as complex as the local government,” says Gao, as he reflects on his professional experience implementing digital solutions for private organisations.

“There’s so many different services we have and so much information to share... So, the information architecture and how the content is structured become critically important.

“And overlaying that with very good creative [elements] helps the community to easily navigate to the information that they need and make their experience as frictionless as possible,” he highlights.

By focusing on user experience and optimising business processes, the team managed to consolidate 85 council services into 30 online forms. Smart forms have also been adopted, which use conditional logic to filter relevant questions to ask for a particular request.

“[For the corporate website], instead of having pages and pages content for the community to read, we've simplified it with graphics so people can quickly scan and transact on them - on the go on their mobile and tablet devices,” he adds.

Government-as-a-Platform approach

CityConnect also makes it easier for residents and staff-alike to manage their requests in a one-stop shop.

Residents are not bounced back and forth across different online platforms for a single request, and do away with the need to call up or visit the government office to follow up on their requests.

For staff, the customer relationship management (CRM) platform automatically routes the requests to the different business units, and enables a bird’s eye view of all the requests routed to him/her.

“We use SMS and email notifications activated within our CRM platform to proactively notify the community member of the status changes of a particular request,” Gao explains.

The council is also partnering with Microsoft to create a single sign-on (SSO) platform that allows residents to have one login pass to access most of the council services and simplify the digital experience for the community.

He explains that federal, state and council levels of government in Australia currently adopt different authentication platforms.

Future plans

Gao shares that the council is now looking to onboard 150 more services, and focus on government-to-business (G2B) processes on the platform.

“Something we’re also looking at in the near term is that based on the profiles of the community members, we would like to recommend them more relevant services moving forward by leveraging on existing data we have from prior transactions,” he adds.

As for the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for personalisation, he says while the council is experimenting with Microsoft’s existing functions, there is currently “too much hype and the benefits are not justified from an enterprise perspective” for a larger-scale AI implementation.

“We’ve got a roadmap over the next few years underlining the things we need to work on as we have limited funding and resources. So, we have to very carefully prioritise where we divert the funds and capacities to,” he adds.