Department of Justice and Community Safety Victoria (DJCS) has over 11+ agencies within its portfolio and spans over 14,000 staff. The current DJCS Service Portal where internal team members raise tickets for IT support and hardware/software requests is not fit for purpose and employees find it hard to navigate and confusing. This has affected the uptake and staffs are discouraged to use the Service Portal.
The lack of self-service is putting additional pressure on the Technology Solutions team to handle large volumes of unstructured requests submitted via email or phone.
The Service Portal is built on ServiceNow platform. Our task was to:
For this project, we partnered with EnablePS - a dedicated ServiceNow Elite Partner. We approached the project in 2 stages:
To began, we organised a meeting with all the key stakeholders and members who are involved in the operations of the Service Portal. The kick off meeting gave us a deeper understanding and validation to the pain points that were outlined in the brief.
While our user interviews were getting organised, we began to look at the data in the Service Portal to get a better understanding of how users are currently utilising the portal.
After synthesising the data, we understand that:
In the current user journey, we believe there was friction in the initial stages of the current user journey,
We also performed a usability inspection on the Service Portal to see how they measure against best practices.
Reframing the problem
The key insights had revealed that requests were getting completed and in a timely manner. However, half of the users were not actively using the portal. We then reframed the problem statement:
How might we...
Knowing that there were issues in the initial phases of the portal uptake, we designed our interviews to prompt users with questions relating to the awareness and onboarding phases apart from usability.
Having interviewed over 30 interviewees which consist of stakeholders, support staff members and recent portal users, we were able to collect over 400 minutes of recording and 100+ data points. We did an affinity mapping to group common themes and identify patterns.
We organised a playback session to all the key stakeholders and presented a user journey map that highlights areas of contention, focus areas for optimisation, and help us socialise our findings.
From the journey map, the focus areas in the user journey are:
The journey map played a crucial role as it told the end-to-end story of the different users in the portal. It gave clarity to the other areas outside the portal that required further improvements to provide users with a better user experience. It also helped to open up conversations between the departments to uncover the bigger underlying issues of the operations.
We also included initial recommendations in a report for each of the focus areas.
Based on our research, we’ve uncovered some common themes that we will be imbuing into our new portal designs.
The 3 themes that we’ll really be focusing on are consistency, confidence and usability.
We also created a moodboard that functions as our guiding star as we progress with the designs the portal.
In our final designs, we utilised the design assets provided by DJCS to create consistency and build confidence with the users. From our research, users were not confident in ticket submissions as there were 3 different portals. Having a consistent look and feel throughout the portal gave the users confidence that were navigating within the DJCS Service Portal.
We strategically placed various functionalities and widgets on the homepage to help with usability. We also added a panel to broadcast new improvements made to the portal. Users mentioned that they were not aware that improvements have been made since the last time they've used the portal. Feedback forms were also strategically placed in various sections of the portal to capture feedback from users. This will allow DJCS to identify areas for improvements for their users.
As EnablePS were restructuring the catalogue items and simplifying the request forms, we created various templates for different pages to support them with building the new improved forms and pages.
The final designs have been approved and delivered to Enable for build. The stakeholders were happy with the overall designs and usability improvements.
We will be adding more tracking to the data to allow us to measure how successful it is as compared the current portal in a few months time after the launch.