Chinese government service app

浙里办 - 浙江政务服务

UX design intern [2019]

Introduction

Chinese government has been actively promoting online government services and issued detailed documents guiding the design and development of government service apps for provinces. These apps give citizens access to government involved services, such as filing tax, checking insurance, paying tickets, etc, in a faster and more efficient way. The apps are also evaluated based on the criteria in the government documents as part of each provincial government’s work each year. In my opinion, these apps are the combinations of to C and to G (government) products. ZheLiBan (浙里办) is the official government service app for Zhejiang province.

If you are still confused, don’t worry, look at my illustration.

I was given the task:

Redesign the app for 2.0 version and improve usability.

Current Design

Research

To better understand how “to C&G” product are normally structured, I studied official government service products for Guangzhou, Zhejiang, and Shenzhen provinces.

There are a lot of trivial services. Thus one of the biggest challenges for the designers is

How might we effectively organize all information so that the users can easily find what they want.

Information Architecture

One problem I found with the current version was that the information architecture is disorganized. There are multiple entry points on different pages with distinct names for the same content, which confuses users and adds service-finding difficulties.

I explored two ways to re-structure the current information architecture to make sure the entry point for each page is clear and there’s no loop between pages.

Option A

Show most popular service categories on home page. All services (original service market) can be accessed through the“more service” button on home page. The corresponding medium fidelity prototype is next to the adjusted information architecture.

Option B

Show all categories on home page. When clicked, show all services under the category. Omit the original service market.

I decided to go with Option B. For Option A, home page is simplified, but there might be negative feelings when users can’t find the wanted category right away. Users need to go through the categories first on home page and then in service market page to find the wanted services, which requires 3 clicks on average. For Option B, users can easily find the category they want in one page, and there are only two clicks before users can perform their tasks.

Visual Exploration

Recently Used

Digital ID Card

Final Flow

Looking Forward

What I learned — Design for Accessibility. Since Zheliban is an official government app, it is designed for everyone, which includes the population that has difficulties using digital products, such as the elderly and the disabled. As designers, it is our job to ensure the design makes the product accessible for everyone. It would take a lot of researches and user testings to make a product all-round accessible to everyone, but we could go step-by-step by first adjusting the web color contrast to make it accessible to the users with low vision or color blindness. W3C has published a lot of helpful materials about how to make web more accessible, such as Web Content Accessibility Guidelines(WCAG). I’m very grateful I had chance to learn about these, which are real problems designers need to solve, and these will help me make better design decisions.

If I had more time working on the project, I would look into the other pages of the app, adjusting their information architecture to work better with the redesign of Home Page, and in turn improve the overall usability of the app.