Mobile Service Centres assist regional and disaster-affected townships. Accurate information needed to be easily accessed
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.
As a result of the 2019-2020 bushfires, residents from affected areas had difficulty accessing service centres either because their roads had closures, their nearest service centre was too far away or a combination of both.
Due to this, Service NSW came up with a fast solution by creating Mobile Service Centres. Mobile Service Centres travel from town to town in regional areas on a daily basis, even during times of being disaster-free.
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There were quite a few learnings from the fast launch of the mobile service centres. One of the main issues was that residents weren’t aware of when mobile service centres were going to arrive at their township and we needed to improve that awareness and access to information through our website product.
Both staff and customers actually have a similar goal of finding a practical location given the constraints of time and location. They only have a difference in who they are finding it for.
The solution should not only pertain to the current bus routes but must be scalable for future needs (increased/decreased bus routes). Secondly, the users must be able to distinguish the differences between service centres and mobile service centres to understand the temporary nature of the dates and times.
The Service NSW website is the main reference point for our customers and Service NSW staff, so I had to ensure that we met the needs of both user groups.
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 – Joining Service NSW after the bushfire, my first initiative was to focus on Mobile Service Centres on Locate Us.
As the sole product designer working on this initiative, I started with a comparative analysis, followed by ideation, staff surveys, design, prototyping, remote staff usability testing and customer usability testing.
Throughout this project, I paired with our externally sourced front-end developer and 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.