A research piece into how the website product could support those with vision impairments who want to self-serve
Service NSW is a New South Wales Government agency within the Department of Customer Service that provides one-stop access to government services and other partner agencies via online, phone or in-person at its service centres.
The primary goal of this project was to investigate what accessibility issues customers were facing daily and turn those learnings into an implemented solution.
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One of the core values of Service NSW and our product team was to strive to create inclusive website experiences. The aim was to always provide equal access to information for all customers, regardless of their ability or environment, especially during the pandemic.
With that being said, New South Wales was constantly in and out of lockdowns due to COVID-19 with the vulnerable and less older demographic isolated from state-based services.
This demographic is quite dependent on in-person assistance at service centres as they tend to be less digitally literate in combination with cognitive, degenerative issues and we needed to make improvements to our website product to assist in self-service wherever possible due to isolation
The website product team at Service NSW is relatively large with a small number of Product Designers, Two Senior Product Designers and one Principal Product Designer. Due to the content management demand, our team was largely content designers. Each designer focused on their initiative priority – my focus at this time was accessibility improvements.
As the sole product designer working on this initiative, I initially conducted staff interviews, desk research, technical feasibility study, design and customer user testing.
Throughout this project, I paired with two front-end developers (one internal, the other external partner) and a content designer.
This initiative was in part remote and in-person due to the nature of lockdowns, however, was able to conduct interviews in person during low COVID-19 transmission numbers.
The research included interviews with staff and customers was essential to delivering a proven solution.
To begin with, it made sense to hear from those who interact directly with the user demographic every day at the service centres, digital and customer service representatives. I wanted to hear what questions they usually receive from our older customers, what issues they face and identify any recurring themes. These interviews were conducted remotely in group sessions with staff from the metro and regional service centres. It turned out a lot of our older demographic customers had quite a lot of difficulty reading due to visual disabilities.