Moving Government Services Online with Security Layer
Objective
The website for the City of Boston, Boston.gov, was redesigned by IDEO to be more modern and act like a helpful human. It currently lists services paired with instructions on how to do them in person, by mail, or on a completely different online system. In order to stay ahead of the game in the digital world, they wanted to digitalize all of their common services, starting with birth, marriage and death certificates.
Challenge
The challenge here is that anyone can request a certificate on behalf of someone else without his/her permission, which raises privacy, security and identity theft concerns.
Course: Designlab UX Academy
Timeline: 2 weeks, November 2017
Role: UX/UI Designer, responsible for all phases in the design process
Tools: Sketch, Marvel
Research
The goals of the research process is to discover:
what the users need for requesting a birth/marriage/death certificate online
their pain points and frustrations they may have experienced in obtaining a certificate in person or by mail in the past
what the expectations for the online service are for those who have never requested any type of certificate before
how a site establishes trust with its users and when a user feels safe submitting their personal information
The immersion method was conducted by requesting the birth certificate myself online using other similar websites to gain insights into how they handle the online birth certificate request service. Next, the secondary research was performed by exploring the Boston.gov site and reviewing the current process, certificate request form, and instructions for obtaining a birth certificate by mail and in person to get an idea of what kind of info they seek from users and its rules and restrictions. During the user interviews, interviewees expressed their fears about potential data security and identity theft risks associated with submitting their personal information online. Learning about their concerns helped defined the focal point of the whole project.
Defining the product
Sitemap
Referencing the Boston.gov site, I've laid out its content categories accessible from its homepage and determined where the new pages (log in/Sign up page and online certificate request) would fit into its existing information architecture.
User Flow
I created the user flow to determine how a typical user would start navigating upon landing on one of how to get certificate pages via the direct link from the quick Google search to obtaining online certificate with and without online account. To address the fraud concern, I introduced a security layer requesting user to go through identification verification process during the sign up stage. If the user decides to not create an online account, he/she has the option to select mail or in-person method. The step by step id verification process was inspired by the Airbnb's id verification process. I reviewed Airbnb’s terms and conditions and their privacy policy and it appeared that they have set up tools to ensure that the sensitive information and their databases where the images and sensitive data are stored are protected and secured.
Designing
Lo-fidelity Wireframes sketches
I started sketching wireframes to determine the navigation flow of how the user would arrive to the screen to request birth certificate online and what the sign up (online account set up) process would look like incorporating the id verification step by step flow.
Hi-fidelity Mockups & Interactive Prototype
Digital hi-fi mockups were designed in Sketch referencing the lo-fi wireframes and the existing brand guidelines from IDEO and then exported into Marvel app for prototyping. The interactive prototype was established with the assumption that a common user performs a quick Google search and then lands on "How to get a birth certificate" page within Boston.gov (https://www.boston.gov/departments/registry/how-get-birth-certificate). An online option is added to that page to allow user to request the certificate digitally followed by the registration/id verification flow.
Testing
To test the navigational flow of the prototype, the test subjects were asked to request the birth certificate online.
Affinity map
User test feedback was then compiled into an affinity map. Majority of participants appreciated the new id verification process with reassurance that it adds the security cushion and thought the instructions were straightforward and the flow was simple and quick. However, during the live testing, the confusion was visibly seen on several participants' faces when trying to navigate to the sign up/login page from the online birth certificate request page. It was not clear to them that they were required to create an account first before filling out the online certificate request form.
To ensure the user knows where to navigate next clearly, firming the instructions by providing inline clickable links to sign up/login page near the online form, improving the progress bar in the id verification step, and providing the profile icon as clear indication when the user is logged in are some of the major improvements made to the prototype to address some of the high risk/top priority issues.
Next Steps
In addition to continue to keep reiterating designs based on the user feedback, the online service capability can be extended to marriage and death certificates and other common government services (i.e. get resident parking permits, appeal a parking ticket, etc). To further enhance seamless user experience, a logged-in environment with the personalized dashboard can be added to give Bostonians easy/quick access to personal information, transactions history and services that are all centralized in one place and pertain to them.