Service NSW Digital Notifications

My role in this initiative involved running design workshops, creating wireframes and design concepts and facilitating moderated user testing sessions with NSW citizens and local government agencies.

Service NSW Digital Notifications allows government agencies to send messages to citizens, and provides a unified inbox for citizens to receive messages from government, as an alternative to paper notices sent by mail.

Data from customer feedback in Digital Notifications revealed that there was strong desire for receiving government notifications digitally – particularly after the increase in Service NSW app users due to the pandemic – but the existing notifications inbox had readability and hierarchical issues. These issues were preventing users from getting fast access to important notifications such as a notices for paying their car registration.

By making it easier for Digital Notifications customers to use the notifications inbox and increasing customer satisfaction, it would encourage more NSW citizens to start using the inbox and more government agencies to start sending communications out via the notifications portal.

There were two main opportunities to improve:

• High cognitive load: By reducing the cognitive load it may help customers find and action particular notifications faster.
• Lack of hierarchy: Given the wide range of notifications available to customers, creating a system of hierarchy in the inbox may help customers filter out the less important notifications and more easily find what they’re looking for.

Customer research objective:

• Find insights on personal and business account customer’s behaviour, preferences and expectations when accessing their notifications inbox and preferences page.

Usability testing objectives:

• Usability and comprehension of the Inbox and Preferences pages
• Comprehension of icons, tags and messages
• Customer’s preferences around reminders and channels.

Three possible solutions were put into prototypes to test with users in 1:1 Askable Live sessions, in order to get feedback.

Participants were shared a prototype link and asked to find particular notifications in each different design, as well as the existing Inbox design. I measured how long it took them to find the notifications on each screen, and asked them if they thought it was easier or more difficult than on the previous screen, and why.

5/6 participants said the date separators were familiar to them, as their email client has a similar feature. 4 participants said the space that was added to the page helped break up the content, making it easier to read.

3/6 participants liked the blue icons, however, one mentioned it was foreign to them, as their email client didn’t have icons. Another two participants felt it didn’t add much value to the page.

When it came to coloured icons, only 2/6 participants were in favour of the design. 2 participants found them distracting, and another 1 found them helpful to find what they were looking for, but also distracting. One person noted that the colours would only really be useful if visiting the inbox regularly.

There wasn’t a clear winner for the UI treatment of the inbox list – we would need to combine the qualitative research with best practices and competitor analysis to build further on this. But there were some interesting insights that came out of user testing to help shape the design of the product.

There was some confusion with MyGov. Users may have expected the Inbox to behave in a similar way to MyGov (eg. The Mygov website sends an email when a new message is received in a user’s MyGov Inbox), so we would need to manage expectations/confusion around this.

Some test participants seemed to have a negative association with the word “marketing” and misunderstood it as sales emails, even when the information was not a general sales-type email and could benefit them. Work would need to be done to ensure services were not mis-labelled and their purpose was clear, to improve opt-in rates.

• While working on Digital Notifications, I also created a new design system component for use in the Inbox, as well as throughout the suite of Service NSW Digital Capabilities. The Pagination component, which didn’t exist at the time, was researched, designed and tested against stringent accessibility standards and presented back to the design system team, before being integrated into the design system for all of Service NSW to use.
• During competitor analysis of the Notifications Inbox, I facilitated a knowledge sharing workshop with the team of a similar government-led product in the UK – Gov.uk Notify. This workshop enabled the Digital Notifications team to gain an understanding of how UK government agencies and customers use their product and discuss usability challenges and technical issues the team had faced when establishing their notifications system.