Project Overview
The migration of the Book Facilities feature from the OneService app to LifeSG as part of a greater effort to onboard all of OneService’s features into our platform.
My Contributions
User Interface Design, Frontend Handoff
About the Team
2 Designers, 8 - 10 Engineers
To build a one-stop gateway for all of National Library Board (NLB)'s vast wealth of resources, to position NLB as Singapore's Knowledge Resource.
The key premise of this project is the migration of the Book Facilities feature from the OneService app to LifeSG as part of a greater effort to onboard all of OneService’s features into our platform. Book facilities is one of the prominent offerings on the OneService app — it enables residents to book Town Council facilities such as Barbecue pits, void decks and event spaces in their neighbourhood to cater for different occasions.
Being the principle designer for this project, I had to ensure that the design as well as the experience meets the expectations of LifeSG’s standards — to do this, I had to leverage on LifeSG’s design system to it’s fullest extent, any new components which need to be added had to have a larger use case for it to be considered.
Thus, this required me to work extensively with the designers managing design system components, as well as engineers to identify scalable solutions we could explore to ensure that enhancements could be made to existing components, instead of building new ones.
Stakeholder and project management
This project honed my stakeholder and project management skills — due to the feature being migrated from the OneService app to LifeSG, it was a constant debate of which design philosophies and copywriting standards we should abide by. Managing these discussions required an in-depth understanding of rationale, before proposing a design.
Technical limitations
Some of our stakeholder’s expectations also extended to changes in technical requirements, or the building of new design components. While Book facilities is a feature under OneService, the Town Councils are the owners of the facilities and it’s management system. At times, meant that there were limitations to how much the team could do to improve the existing experience.
Engineering and design collaborations
As a result, these limitations required the joint effort from design and engineering to solution, keeping in mind the usability standards LifeSG has set for our users. Thus it is imperative that we manage the expectations from the stakeholder as well as our internal product team.
User testing experiments
Working with a tighter deadline also required us to explore strategies to adopt user testing into our process — even though time was not allocated for it. Guerilla user testing strategies in the form of short 15 - 20 minute in-person sessions were used to gather key feedback on certain high-interaction screens.
NLB had prior User Experience case studies done by consultancies, which our team used to value add and validate our user research analysing NLB’s web experience.
Through our research, we identified two main pain-points of the website:
As this project was is a migration/revamp, with OneService being part of LifeSG, we also had to design a web experience in addition to the in-app experience as LifeSG uses React. We wanted to value add to the experience as much as possible — there were certain pain points which we identified during the design phase and we sought to improve that.
3 months • (November - January 2023)
Design & solutioning
Studying the existing OneService feature before migration, and business logic involved in making bookings through the feature. New components had to be designed and introduced to fit the new use case.
2 weeks • (January - February 2023)
User testing
Because of efforts to migrate operations, the timeline of the project was trimmed. Thus, we incorporated guerrilla testing into the design process, instead of formal user interview sessions with participants.
5 months • (February - June 2023)
Review & feedback
While the design changes were a welcomed addition, the challenge in this phase was the migration timeline. We had to adapt the design to an MVP state, thus requiring many reconsiderations and reprioritisations within our proposed design.
2 months • (June - September 2023)
Sign-off
This phase targets the management of content within the designs. Both OneService and LifeSG adhered to different copywriting standards — thus, multiple revisions of content had to be reviewed before a sign of on design was achieved.
The objective of this feature is to enable individuals living within public housing estates to search and book facilities for different purposes such as: weddings, engagements, barbecues, baby showers, funerals and wakes.
Based on the purposes, users will be able to book different venues such as HDB void decks, pavilions or barbecue pits.
The main objective of the migration was to achieve feature parity with the OneService app, while leveraging on LifeSG's design system and cross-platform front-end engine to offer users a web and mobile experience. During this migration, the design team sought to find areas where we could value add to the experience.
Enhancement 1: Adapting the design for scalability
As potentially more facilities will be included for citizens to use and book, we foresee the need to scale the selection of time slots to accommodate greater use cases, rather than just single day bookings which were the primary bookings OneService had.
Thus, the component we introduced had more flexibility to scale into accommodating more time slots, potentially enabling users to book facilities by per-hour usage, rather than full day bookings.
Enhancement 2: Improving visibility of fees and costs
In the initial design, fees were only tabulated at the end of their booking journey — this resulted in a mismatch of expectations and would require users to backtrack their journey if they wanted to amend their selections.
To address this, we collated all instances of payables during a booking, such as time slots and utilities to better address this pain point which users faced.
Workflow processes: managing design versioning with stakeholders
Based on the timeline, the review & feedback process took more than 5 months to complete. There were several factors which contributed to this extended time line.
Difference in product philosophies
As we were working with the stakeholders from the OneService app, the intention was to migrate their feature onto LifeSG. However, to maintain consistency with other LifeSG features, this resulted in several functionality and UX writing revisions over the course of months as we were using the LifeSG design system and content guidelines.
This led to many discussions on the importance of maintaining design and language consistency with our stakeholders, and we managed to synergise the strategy from both OneService and LifeSG.
File management limitations
Juggling changes such as design, content and functionality was not easy as each required the approval of different teams within Govtech and stakeholders. We were not able to leverage on Figma to communicate design changes to our stakeholders due to hardware limitations — as a result, each new version of the design had to be exported as PDF, and changes had to be itemised and catalogued for identification.
This consumed majority of the time and effort as there were multiple platforms we had to use to track our changes, such as Google Sheets, Trello and Jira.
Technical road blocks
As mentioned earlier, Book facilities is a feature owned by OneService, while the Town Councils are the owners of the facilities and it’s management system, called Town Council Management Service (TCMS). Each Town Council has the responsibility to create and maintain any facility which they would want to host — resulting in the format of data having little consistency.
Specific edge handlings had to be created to accommodate the needs of some Town Councils such as error states, warning banners and feedback for users. We also had to modify some of our components to fit these use cases.
Change in project direction
In between designing of Book Facilities, there was an additional feature our team was reprioritised to design which was Dementia Alerts for LifeSG. This was a feature under OneService and it's purpose is to alert estate residences of a missing person with dementia within their vicinity. Residents will be notified through a push notification from LifeSG, describing the missing person.
It is important to know that both parties were trying our best to create the best possible product for our end users, as well as to manage the expectations of the organisation.
While the premise of this migration project was relatively straightforward with regards to design processes, the greatest learnings and lessons came from managing communications between different teams and stakeholders.
I wrote a detailed post capturing the insights of my journey.
Trouble convincing stakeholders?
This project was extremely fulfilling as I had a part to play in building Singapore's learning resource and to inspire a new generation of users who would look to the National Library as Singapore's knowledge resource.
During this project, I also had the opportunity to learn how a web interface can have such a strong impact in the perception and the positioning of an organisation. Little details and decisions made with stakeholders ended up shaping this project to be much greater than originally envisioned.
