Taipei City
Public Daycare Application Portal
Crafted a "thoughtful" system that reduces the cognitive workload for parents.
July - August 2021
Client
Taipei City Government
Project Type
UX Design & Research
My Role
Led the end-to-end process, from initial user research, design, and quality insurance for the government platform
Managed communication with government stakeholders to align product vision and navigate project constraint
Designed the information architecture of the system and created prototypes for rapid iterative testing and evaluation
Overview
I participated in this project during my fellowship at the Office of the Digital Minister of Taiwan. Taipei City was facing an increasing number of users who could not successfully finish the public daycare application process. The goal of this project was to help the Department of Social Welfare identify existing usability issues and propose a new web interface for the daycare application portal.
As the project lead, I oversaw the end-to-end process. For the research stage, I identified key pain points and steered project direction through stakeholder interviews (n=3) and usability testing (n=5), which provided insights from multiple perspectives to help us move to the design stage.
For the design stage, I used journey mapping and persona to redesign the entire user flow, which was transformed into a new information architecture. I also conducted concept evaluation (n=5), and ran RITE testing to iterate and validate the solution (n=5).
My team delivered a redesigned system that is compliant with the WCAG 2.0 standard, improved the System Usability Scale score from 58 (25 percentile) to 85 (96 percentile). In November 2023, the Department of Social Welfare started the development of the system.
01 Context
Taipei City faced a lack of public daycare resources.
The public daycare system in Taipei is known for great quality at an affordable price. However, the capacity of daycare centers are limited.
In 2020, there were more than 20,000 newborns in Taipei, while the daycare centers can only admit 1,600 children.
As a result, parents had to apply for spots on the daycare application portal. However, the process was complicated.
The hard-to-use system made the matter worse.
When parents fill out the application online, they have to input a lot of information and supporting documents for the daycare staff to decide on admission priorities.
Because of the system's complexity, 33% of the applicants were not able to finish the application process without calling for help. Many of the applications were sent back for lack of information.
In addition to causing cognitive loads to the parents, the poorly designed system also increased the workload of the staff at the Dept. of Social Welfare because they were required to help the applicants to fill out applications corrently.
A sneak peek of the old application portal.
02 Assumption
The problem was surface-level.
We kicked off the project with a heuristic evaluation to identify obvious issues. As soon as I started the evaluation, I realized our assumption that the problem could be fixed with a surface-level redesign was wrong.
73% of the users are here for the first time
The daycare service was offered to parents with children between the ages of 6 months and 24 months. 73% of the parents applying for public daycare were first-time users of the system (2020). Unfortunately, the entire system provided very little help for users with no existing knowledge. Users have to navigate between at least 3 different web systems to complete the application process.
But why?
I led 3 stakeholder interviews with staff from the city government and daycare center, and we used the information collected to draw an extended stakeholder map to clarify the complex relationship between different organizations involved in the process.
A concise version of the stakeholder map
We presented our findings to our liaison at the city government and proposed we conduct a more systematic redesign of the daycare application portal. However, they were not convinced of the issue and preferred to keep the project scope small, fixing the usability issues of the interface first.
03 Research Planning
Given our primary goal was still to fix the digital interface, we planned remote usability testing to learn more about how real-world users interact with the system.
During the pilot session, the participant encountered a lot of the frustration we expected, and more. We noticed that a lot of the struggle happened outside the daycare portal itself. Seeing their struggle with the system, I invited the director in charge of this system to sit in on the next few interviews.
A research plan tailored to explore and evaluate
Research Questions
The goal of this initial stage of research steered from a system evaluation to the exploration of participants' mental models of the daycare application process. Our main research questions are:
What is the participants' understanding of the public daycare system and its application process?
What are the key pain points preventing the users from effectively and successfully applying for public daycare?
Interview Structure
I revised the testing process and incorporated two sections for semi-structured interviews before and after the usability testing. Each 90-min session included:
Introduction (5 mins)
Generative Interview (25 mins)
Usability Testing (40 mins)
System Usability Score Survey (5 mins)
Post-testing Interview (15 mins)
Recruitment
Given the primary users were new parents with no previous knowledge of the system, we recruited participants who:
have not used the current daycare application portal
have or are preparing for a baby and need the daycare service
The recruitment message is posted on several different channels with exposure to the new parents community, including online forums, Facebook groups, and OB/GYN. We collected demographic information in the recruitment survey to make sure we covered different populations.
Oh wait…
I did not specify the device used for testing in the recruitment message. Because the existing system only had a desktop version, I did not think about testing the mobile experience.
This mistake later caused a serious issue during the interview session. It also provided one of the most important design directions.
04 Discoveries
We interviewed 5 participants at this stage and used affinity diagramming to synthesize the data.
From "hello daycare" to "confused and overwhelmed".
Overall, participants had a positive impression of the public daycare service before they interacted with the application system. They expressed trust in the service while being aware of the difficulty of securing a spot. However, when interacting with the application, all of the participants exhibited different levels of confusion.
4 out of 5 participants were able to finish the application process correctly without searching for additional information with Google or other information platforms.
Problems of the interfaces
From the evaluation section, we observed the following behaviors from the participants.
The attention span and energy of participants were limited. They are constantly under high pressure
The regulations regarding daycare applications are difficult to find and comprehend, which causes participants to fill out applications incorrectly all the time
When applying for daycare, participants have to use different systems to learn about regulations, choose daycare centers, and fill out applications at the same time
The system received a System Usability Score of 58 (at 25 percentile). Our stakeholders who sat in on the user interviews were all surprised with the participants' experiences of the system. One even said, "I felt so anxious seeing them struggle, I just want to turn on my mic and tell them about the correct steps."
Solving Problems beyond the interfaces
Our stakeholders witnessed the participants' struggle with the system. However, the users' interaction with the public daycare system went beyond the application portal itself. We mapped out their entire journey in order to examine their experience from a more holistic perspective.
How Might We
From what the research findings and our conversations with other stakeholders, we focused on these three How Might We to guide our design in the next step:
How might we simplify the information collection process, minimize the cost of searching for and comprehending daycare registration regulations, and reduce misunderstanding?
How might we help users of different demographics compare and choose daycare centers that best match their needs?
How might we increase the efficiency of the registration process and the accuracy of the submitted applications to speed up the process?
One more thing…
One of the most important findings from this stage came as a surprise.
As we did not specify the device type, one of our participants actually used their mobile device to access the system. The existing system was not responsive, and the participant had to frequently zoom in and out to use the system. In the post-testing interview, we learned that this participant did not have access to a computer at home. They usually use their mobile device to access all the digital systems.
I asked other participants following this interview about this issue, and 2 out of 3 indicated that mobile phones were their primary digital device, and the other one expressed that they are equally comfortable with phone and computer.
Because of this interview, I advocated for using a mobile-first strategy to design a responsive web system. This strategy turned out to be a huge success, and had a pivotal effect on the user experience, as shown in our evaluation session later on.
05 Ideation
From HMWs, we conducted several brainstorming sessions, some with other stakeholders, and generated hundreds of ideas.
We evaluated those ideas to see which of the three HMWs they addressed and categorized them by effectiveness and feasibility.
Feasibility was a key concern. Through talking with the stakeholders, we understood that we have a budget and time constraint. Therefore, we want a solution that can make an immediate impact but also has the potential to scale and shape a better user experience in the future.
Using effectiveness, feasibility and three HMWs to guide our downselection
One theme that stood out for us was “linear user journey”.
One of the behaviors we observed in the research was that all participants had to jump between different pages and systems to complete the application process, which can be mentally draining, especially for new parents.
The linear journey was broken down into several independent modules so that the Department of Social Welfare could implement them at different stages.
06 Concept Evaluation
The low-fidelity prototype was used for concept evaluation(n=5).
I broke down user’s actions on the system into three parts and designed them accordingly:
Gather Information
Apply for Daycare
Track Result
Some of the specific design decisions I made included:
Provide necessary information contextually, so users don’t have to browse around for them
Limit the information and decisions on each page and make the CTA elements prominent for users to easily navigate around the system
Present daycare regulation in a more organized and comprehensible way
07 Lo-Fi Prototyping
A low-fidelity prototype was created for concept evaluation(n=5). The nature of the evaluation was exploratory.
We used the evaluation to explore users' reactions to the linear user journey concept. We also include the modified daycare regulations in the prototype to evaluate their comprehensibility.
Linear user journey was a success.
Participants were able to find the necessary steps and information much easier than in the original version. They can also easily comprehend the daycare regulations with the new regulations and FAQ page.
We want to be able to deliver the best possible design within the time constraint, so I proposed the Rapid Iterative Test and Evaluation method to the team.
We recruited 5 participants to conduct usability testing and modify the design and prototypes in between each session.
In this stage, my main responsibilities included:
Planning and running the RITE testing
Iterating design and prototypes related the information architecture
Conducting a virtual evaluation session on Google Meet
09 Final Design
With iterations from the RITE Testing, we introduced our final design.
Provide necessary information contextually so users don’t have to browse around and look for them
Limit the information and decisions on each page and make the CTA elements prominent for users to easily navigate around the system
Present daycare regulation in a more organized and comprehensible way
10 Final Evaluation
The redesigned system received a System Usability Scale score of
85 (at 96 percentile)
a huge improvement from the original 58(at 25 percentile). The system was also compliant with WCAG 2.0 standard.
Participants in the final usability testing demonstrated a positive attitude toward the system:
“The new website is more focused, there was too much irrelevant information on the old website. It always took forever to find information.”
-P1
“The system will guide you from one step to another…It even tells me what document I need beforehand, very intuitive.”
-P3
“Even If I don’t know anything about public daycare, I feel that I can easily learn everything I need from this website.”
-P5
11 Impact
The design was presented to Audrey Tang, the Digital Minister of Taiwan, and officials from the Taipei City government.
Presenting the responsive design on various devices
At the end, we delivered the design concept, user interface of the system, and research report of the system to the Taipei City government. We also provided a road map for implementing the system from the minimum viable product to the whole system.
As the daycare application date was approaching at the end of the project, we also designed a PDF document containing diagrams of the daycare application progress and daycare regulations in more digestible formats to immediately address the problem.
12 My Learning
In this project, the initial scope was only the user interface of the daycare application system
However, we would not be able to uncover a lot of the important insight if we focus only on the application system itself
A lot of the user behavior and struggle happened outside the system
The time of the project coincided with the peak of COVID-19 in Taiwan. As a result, we conducted most of the user interviews and usability testing remotely
The accidental benefit was that we got to see how participants used the system at their home - the “natural environment”. We saw that some participants had to take care of their children while participating in the usability testing session
One participant asked us before the session “Can I use my phone? I am taking care of my child and my phone is more accessible.” This observation directly inspired us to go with the mobile-first approach