General Boat Licence
Westpac | 2021 | Service Design, UX Research, UX and skills
Maritime NSW's General Boat Licence was redesigned and modernised as apart of the state Government's initiatives to modernise digital infrastructure.
The Problem
The General Boat Licence is Maritime NSW's largest volume authorisation. It was being migarted to a new platform, creating the opportunity to uplift their current licensing processes. The focus was to remove pain points and reduce their operational mosts associated with an older, more manual paper-based process.
UX Research
To understand the current state, we hosted workshops with stakeholders from all state agencies involved in the process, from the Service NSW team members in service centres to Maritime’s licensing staff behind the scenes. Along with a total of 19 individual interviews, our UX research allowed us to capture the service on a macro and micro level.
This gave us a wholistic end-to-end view of how customers could apply for a boat licence with many customisations available to the customer, to complete the journey as they want. Consequently, the back office processes were not streamlined to accomodate this.
UX Research At Glance
9
Maritime SME's interviewed
10
Boat licence holders
4
workshops with training providers
I conducted 5 interviews with customers, 3 with Maritime SME's and co-facilitated the worshops.
Findings
I synthesised our insights and identified a ‘choose your own adventure’ like process of how the general boat licensing operates, with all systems used, stakeholders engaged and customers analysed.
From our research we identified 3 primary ways in being:
1. The Logbook
2. An Authorised Training Provider
3. Recognised Qualifications.
I created 3 mini journey maps to visualise the differences in who processes the transaction, what system is used and back end impacts.
I was also able capture more personal insights from our engagements with stakeholders. By clustering and further synthesising our insights, I discovered how people engage with the General Boat licence on a deeper level.
The Future State
With these requirements we created a ‘happy state’ service blueprint to exemplify how these concepts come together to create a complete solution that accommodates every stakeholder’s needs.
Additional servcie design was completed to accomodate regional, underage and older customers who have additional needs. This meant more steps and systems, impacting the service which we designed separately to give it the care it needs.
Strategic Decision-making
I put forward the idea to do the Recognised Qualifications journey first. This was selected as the initial launch due to its smaller volume size. This was against external pressure to deliver the largest volume transaction first.
I assisted the team in compliling a product vision of the General Boat Licence that scaled with the complexity of its technical components.
The Recognised Qualifications Pathway journey is portrayed visually below.
UI
Solution testing
& iteration
We tested our recognised qualifications journey with low-fidelity screens with 2 Maritime SME's and 2 customers. We recieved positive feedback with tips to smooth over the service. We identified a discrepancy in how citizens can access the service during the tetsing.
This prompted me to complete a more exhaustive accessibility audit to support the modernisation of their processes to be more inclusive, to those who know English as a second language and people with disabilities. This added value by broadening the service for the Citizens in NSW and treating all customers with equal care.
MVP
With the input from the testing implemented into the future state service blueprint.
Plans were created and implemented to push the project into the next stage, and I had begun to transition to the Build stage when the state election caused the project to pause. It was shelved with the intention to restart in the future, as the Program continued but the roadmap reprioritised.