2021-2023
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Collaborated with other product designers on Inbox
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Led 5 design initiatives across teams
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Championed for better design-developer handoffs
Initiative 1: Improved organisation and control of messages in Singpass app Inbox
This project was done in collaboration with 1 product designer and 1 design researcher.
Context
The Singpass app Inbox enables government agencies to securely reach 3.5 million users. As more agencies turned to Inbox as a trusted channel for nationwide messages, especially amid rising SMS phishing scams in 2022, the team worked on improving its design to support future scalability.
Problems
How might we help users better organise Singpass app Inbox messages?
How might we give users better control over what notifications they receive?
People were getting upset about messages in Inbox
Design approach
To minimize unfamiliarity towards new designs amid scams, the team opted for small design tweaks, focusing on how users categorize messages. The team proceeded to do an in-person moderated card sort.
Participants are tasked to organise and also rank these 30 inbox messages
Findings
Participants were task-focused and saw Inbox as a place that communicated the things they needed to do. Common themes were:
Urgent, for action
Clear course of action, often with implied consequence. (eg. fines, offence committed, unauthorised use of account)
Notices, govt service matters
Acknowledgement that user has action they have taken outside of app (e.g. form submitted or notice on personal matters)
Security, Singpass account, system
System initiated, regarding account or security matters (eg. new browser log in, Singpass info retrieved)
Information, news
General information that is widely available on public channels (eg. budget, digital IC now accepted)
We also learnt about how users prioritised messages:
Design solutions
Message categories (for better organisation)
These categories were chosen as they are relevant to users, clear & distinct for government agencies to tag their messages and objective to one’s life stages.
For Action
Contains a time-bound action for the user to perform
Transactions
Response or receipt to an action or event performed by the user
News & Info
General messages containing publicly available information
Message threads (for better organisation)
Emulate how emails group messages from the same thread into 1 common thread. In Singpass' case, we group messages with the same title and sender into 1 thread.
Before
After
Notification settings (for better control)
Impact
Every month, about 30,000 users filter their Inbox messages with the categories.This has allowed users with large volumes of messages to read the most crucial messages.
Initiative 2: Improving Singpass app accessibility
Context
After launching an updated Inbox and Shortcuts in Singpass app, I saw an opportunity to gather accessibility feedback before growing these features further.
We ran 4 remote user interviews with visually impaired users from SGEnable.
We learnt many VoiceOver and Talkback bugs that could be fixed, some examples include:
Search bar’s buttons weren’t reading out actions correctly
Unread messages can’t be differentiated from read messages
Selected message categories weren’t read out
Recruitment form
Remote interviews for greater convenience
Excel sheet compilation of bugs to fix
In addition
In later part of 2024, I also spoke to a visually impaired user in-person who contacted us through a Customer Support ticket. He faced difficulties logging in to Singpass as he’s unable to enter his Singpass app passcode based on the existing audio TalkBack.
Collaborating with the Android developer, we enhanced the passcode input with improved haptic feedback and audio cues, announcing entered digits and the remaining count as users type.
Impact
The accessibility improvements have enabled more visually-impaired Singpass users to transact with government digital services independently and conveniently.
Initiative 3: Enhancing design-developer handoff
Defined responsiveness of illustrations to eliminate “free-floating” illustrations in the app
Defined responsiveness of drawers
Documented drawer behaviours
Increasing use of Drawers for new features led to multiple variants appearing in the code across both operating systems.
Built native search bars based on OS familiarity
Impact
Built more scalable and engineering friendly components and patterns in the code base.
Increased clarity has also helped to improve cleanliness of both designers' and developers' files.