Government Republic of Zambia
This was a series of project for the vision of Smart Zambia- A country in Southern Africa. Ensuring that the Government of Zambia succeeds in its goal of a SMART Zambia, by providing high impact electronic or “e” services, will contribute to achieving the Government of Zambia's mandate on strategic objectives like: economic growth, enabling citizens and being an ICT leader in Africa. This outcome can only be possible if there is an adoption of e-services by the Government of Zambia itself.
My Roles: UX Lead, UX Strategy, User Research, Interaction Designer, Visual Designer, Customer Workshops,
Electronic Cabinet
The Government of the Republic of Zambia Cabinet office, is responsible for all correspondence between Government Ministries and the government. This correspondence exchange is facilitated using defined processes and document types, established by the Cabinet Office’s Policy and Coordination Division. (PAC). As part of Smart ABC, Cabinet office needs to automate the processes, in order to track the memorandum against the submission date, enhancing the security and information classification, as well as to ensure the ministries are achieving the expected results.
The expected impact is to change the manual process - removing the need of paper to be moved everywhere, reduce cost, automate process, provide visibility at each stage for all stakeholders, dashboards, search of memorandums.
For an audience like the government officials of Zambia country, it was even more important to conduct proper user research to cater to special demographics, languages, tribes , age group, the culture of Zambia country, their existing way of working, infrastructure. I conducted extensive user research with various roles within the cabinet office and different ministries. The culture and needs and wants differed from role to role.
Insights from onsite user research:-
- Ministries had an informal way of working with frequent delegations, it was important that the new solution is flexible, caters to delegation or user switching as much as possible.
- Each ministry has different work culture - forcing a standard way to submit memos across 31 ministries might not go down very well. Stress on not how to tell them to how to do their job which they have been using for years.
- More than beautification, the tasks at hand were or prime importance
- Concern whether a new technology would work in Zambia country given its infrastructure, issues like internet connectivity
- People in the lower hierarchy doing reprographic services could lose their jobs due to automation
- Thousands of memos in the cabinet office were organized in differently color coded folders – eg. Blue for Finalized, pink for conveyances. The cabinet document unit was a locked safe room.
The process is as follows on a macro level. This had to be translated to screens. Each of these were broken down to many more sub processes:-
Following user research, the functional specification document was made hand in hand along with the UX wireframes. This was to ensure that the former style of working – FSD made first then the UX comes, as a result the only function of UX is to make things look pretty. But with the wireframes and FSD going hand in hand it was made sure that the technical as well as user experience are in place to ensure the best intuitive application.
Care was taken to ensure the transition from physical to digital as easy as possible. The same color folders were used as in the cabinet room to make it easy for the cabinet people to recognize and archive the correct folders. Some of the insights were also fed into change and adoption and functional specifications. The frequent delegation of roles was taken care through easy to access role transfer.
eServices
(One stop for all the eServices
– tax, visas, permits etc. )
The e-Government portal is primarily concerned with making government services available to the citizens of the country through the innovative use of information and communication technologies.For this project the success metrics were: The user will be able to use the e-services to complete any formal process and 100% of the users interact with the application.
The design was made keeping I mind Zambia country's vision of Smart Zambia with a clean modern look at the same time maintaining their prime heritage values of connectedness to nature with the color ‘green’. The same colors as the country's flag were used but more subtle tones. Pictures depicting agriculture, mining, along with their heritage were used.
Apart from work, with my deep interest in travel and exposure to different places and culture this project was one of the most challenging as well as satisfying and a great period of learning.
*Names/logos have been changed to protect NDA under Microsoft
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