Reaching out for help from the community

Some of you might know (I think we’ve mentioned at the CX Comprac most recently) that we’ve been looking at how our Guides and the Design Standards help teams build great government services – or how we might provide something more useful.

We’ve been working away at a new way of organising our resources, and are getting close to being able to release an early version of our work publicly.

In the meantime – and in the interests of collaboration and creating opportunities for feedback – we would love to hear from anyone who is keen to help us check that we’re on the right track.

If you’re in the business of agile digital delivery, or you’re just about to set out on work to design a product or service experience (whatever methodology your team practices) please let us know as we’d love to see how digital.nsw resources help, and where they could help better! (Just let us know below, or shoot us a message)

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Hi James,

I thought this may be of use here. It might help establish some opportunities for feedback. My little community of small business owners/users and NSW concierges are doing a post mortem on the Dine and Discover campaign. This what I’ve written to the NSW Small Business Commissioner. He is on the Australian Business Register Advisory Council in order to make the D&D “eligibility for small business” process flow seamlessly.

Dear Commissioner, You’d appreciate the Dine and Discover (D&D) campaign finishes, officially, at the end of this financial year. in 27 days.

The likelihood of achieving its primary aim = Stimulating the NSW economy with $500m = is slim. As a first attempt, the campaign might only achieve less than half what it set out to do. In part, these are teething problems of a poor, on-the-run, design. So could we, at this point, revisit the pain points for small businesses while they are fresh in our minds.

The introduction of five codes for each ABN should ensure that small businesses can provide more useful statistical information to planners. Additionally, it should enable our small businesses to self-register for any State or National campaign that requires an interrogation of the Australian Business Register to verify an applicant’s ID Attributes. (excuse the geekspeak. N.B An Attribute is any information that can be verified to prove up/strengthen a person’s, or business’s, ID)

The D&D campaign has illustrated the need for co-design between the Australian Business Register’s, and the State’s, digital designers. There must also be some input from people like us to ensure that an implementation won’t have small business people pulling their hair out in frustration and their concierges reduced to robots. Could we institute a small business digital design user group , which includes people from NSW campaigns’ digital design teams? This would NOT be an advocacy group. Its aim would be to recognise and prioritise our users’ pain points and investigate if there is an easier way to route around them, end to end. Ideally our common aim is to make an online process flow seamlessly with reusable code.

One other D&D design consideration. Jenny at smallbusinessassistance informs us D&D applicants should provide “Photos, pamphlets, or evidence of the business’ website displaying the business name, logo and evidence the business provides relevant eligible services ” in order to prove up a business’s D&D eligibility. These Attributes could also be added to an ABN’s listing, especially if it’s useful in marketing NSW small business locations and industries; and complements other Statewide campaigns. The ABR could become a marketing concierge, by offering different views of this information.

Lastly. I was sad, after initially hearing about the D&D campaign in Feb. I looked around immediately for the “front end”. I.e. an outline of the marketing. I wondered how and where D&D promotion was planned to integrate with existing tourist marketing campaigns (like The Pie Trail). It never evolved. https://mybusiness.service.nsw.gov.au/dine-and-discover/business-finder There was no end-to-end planning.

That’s a brief post mortem of the D&D campaign. It’s as far as we can go until our little group have a convenient feedback place at NSW’s digital design table for products/campaigns/services that impact small business.

WE could use some advice here on how the D&D campaign, and others, might be improved. Please don’t shoot the messenger :slight_smile:

Thanks Simon

User groups are an option digital teams might choose as their user research approach when they are setting out to ensure they understand the problem space and user’s pain points. Interviews or focus groups can be a useful part of user research activities in the discovery and alpha phase of digital projects.

For your feedback and suggestions on Dine & Discover you might want to use the Dine & Discover program’s contact page to make sure it gets to the right team.

Many thanks for the direction to the D&D team James,

I’m sorry my previous post was so long. I put it on this thread because you were asking for creating opportunities for feedback, and this solution (multiple ANZIC codes per each ABN) seems to offer a good illustration of how a NSW service can be improved by redesigning a National register.

Your reply did illustrate the need for this kind of a forum in order to give feedback to product teams, in a more coordinated manner than existing channels. To be honest we have a systematic problem with feedback at the moment. e.g. Just hit the feedback tab on this (or any) page. Try ringing the phone number or sending a message with an attachment. I have 20 users who have given up trying.

To be fair, most designers get continually distracted by opportunities for improvements, while users, because there is no patient traffic cop like yourself, spend most of their time looking for the appropriate time and place to raise their hand, or just go away in frustration.

So could we give some serious consideration to using this forum (and maybe an associated blog) for both NSW Government digital designers, and their product user groups. Its getting bit impossible to handle the correspondence between two design teams and my user groups by email.

To get serious about this, all we need is a link from a user’s MyServiceNSW account to forums that are product centric. Thanks.

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