When Pokémon GO was all the rage in Singapore, Eve Tay was anxiously walking around Singapore to catch them all. Little did she know, several Pokémon hunting trips with her colleague

From raising Pokémon to raising a baby

Beneath the corporate suit, Chien Koh Wei is the superhero dad dearly loved by his family. Seeing how his first child Eve, who now is 5 years old, constantly wants to be around him, it is clear that Koh Wei has been doing a great job as a dad and is striving to be a role model for his daughters

Super-dad goes the extra mile

For 30-year-old Nurul Atiqah Zulkifli, being the mother of two and a wife to a Singapore Civil Defence Force first responder is not an easy feat. Just after her second child came along, she made the hard choice to leave her job to be a full-time homemaker

Keep calm and be a mom

Since she was in secondary school, Cheryl Choo developed an interest in helping others. “I do voluntary work because I think that if you can, you should give back to the society,” she believes

A gift that keeps on giving

Growing LifeSG Some of you may know that LifeSG was formerly known as Moments of Life, an app for new parents that aimed to transform the way people interacted with the government. With the success of Moments of Life, the next logical move was to replicate that success for more people, and in many other areas of life in Singapore. The challenge? We had to do it concurrently . From the very start, we knew that if we wanted to expand our success, we needed to do more than just expand our team. To stay agile as we scale, we also needed to reorganise and operate very differently from before. And that was how we became the first in GovTech’s Digital Design and Development (DCube) to split into multiple development squads working on a single product. As usual, if you’re the first to do something, you’ll be the first to fail. We went through the cycle of experiment > fail > learn > repeat. This cycle may sound crazy, but it’s the same process we all go through when navigating a new stage of our lives, whether it’s living together with a new spouse or caring for a newborn. In fact, we also go through the same process when we’re playing a computer game for the first time. We’ll always have to adapt and learn from what doesn’t work, then try again. If you’re a gamer, you’ll know that every game has that final boss, the one that’s most challenging to beat. In expanding LifeSG, our final boss is toxic competition. It’s when team members start seeing themselves as ‘I’ and ‘You’, instead of ‘Us’ and ‘We’. When individuals start vying for personal recognition rather than contributing to the team’s success. That’s when we know we’re in trouble. Building relationships The strategy we formulated to defeat toxic competition was to make it easy for everyone from different squads to come together, forge friendships, and develop empathy for each other. After all, we’re all part of the bigger LifeSG team. To do so, we were very mindful about two things. The first is to create an environment that’s safe for everyone to voice diverse views respectfully. There will always be occasions where we’ll have to agree to disagree, and accept the collective decision that has been made by the team. But what’s more important is that everyone in the team knows that their opinion will be heard and considered before an informed and calculated decision is made. This is known as psychological safety, and is embraced by many organisations. The second is to create opportunities for people from different squads to work with each other. We encourage people to move between different squads, to get exposed to different contexts of work, and discover how other teams organise themselves. For example, our support team is made up of representatives from different teams — and this rotates every sprint. This practice goes against the philosophy of many organisations who believe that a close-knit team is able to work more efficiently. Our perspective is different. We believe that each individual will learn and grow faster by working with many people and personalities, and this growth helps them contribute better to any team they are a part of. While it can be awkward working with new people all the time, we’ll eventually get comfortable with being uncomfortable. When that happens, we’ll always be able to contribute, no matter where we go. The night Mama gave birth to School of Rock LifeSG’s School of Rock was created as a result of the opportunities Mama saw for people to come together. Mama is one of our leads that has been through the phases of growth and has always been looking after our people, including those not under her direct care. She proposed for both our squads, ‘Back to School’ and ‘Rocket’ to come together to overcome a challenge where they temporarily renamed themselves ‘School of Rock’. Other than triggering laughs from those of us who are old enough to have watched the comedy, the name also suggested the strength of people coming together, growing each other’s knowledge (school) to overcome hard problems (rocks). More importantly, it’s a sign that our strategy works. We may not have Jack Black to rock the stage, but we do have many other superstars who are willing to experiment, fail, learn and repeat. And that’s how we roll. School of Rock in LifeSG was originally published in LifeSG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

School of Rock in LifeSG

For the past few months, I’ve been working on LifeSG (previously known as Moments of Life). As the UX Writer for LifeSG, my role is to research, write and test government content for: Support for your job search Retrenchment benefits and measures At first, we planned to meet citizens face-to-face for usability testing (UT) sessions in May. But COVID-19 happened and remote working became the norm. We quickly got our heads around and ran our first round of remote usability testing for content from 13 to 24 April 2020, with 10 participants. What is content usability testing? We’re all familiar with usability testing for design flows and interaction patterns. With usability testing, we collect insights, findings and observations about how people use a product or a service. But what about testing the content in a product? Content usability testing focuses on how users interpret or interact with the words. It asks the user questions on: Clarity : Was the content clear and easy to understand? Usefulness : Did you find the content useful or relevant? Voice & tone : What is your impression of the voice and tone? Findability : Are you able to find the information you need easily? Confidence : Are you confident in knowing what to do after reading this? Quick methods for content testing There are a variety of content testing methods out there. Depending on your project needs, objectives, resources and timeline, use the methods that suit your team best. But definitely test your content, since users rely on words to use or navigate your product. For LifeSG’s content UT, we used 3 methods: highlighting test, comprehension survey and readability survey. 1. Highlighting test First, we asked the participant to read the content at their own pace. They are encouraged to think aloud and share their thoughts at any time they wish to. We then asked the participant to highlight the information that they found useful, clear or relevant in green, and the information that they found not useful, unclear or irrelevant in red. 2. Comprehension survey Remember comprehension multiple-choice questions (MCQs) back in school? Comprehension surveys are simply questions to test whether the participant understands a piece of content. After participants highlight their responses, we invite them to answer a series of simple and factual questions about the content they have just read. Participants are free to refer to the content while completing the survey. We want to test their understanding and recall, but not their memory. 3. Readability survey Taking inspiration from the System Usability Scale (SUS), our team needed a quick way to measure the success of our content. We came up with 4 statements and asked participants to give a score based on: ease of reading clarity usefulness user confidence The scoring interpretation is kept simple and we looked at the average of participants’ scores for each statement. While we wouldn’t dare to claim statistical significance, this at least gave us a quick idea of how well our content did. Tips for remote usability testing With all these COVID-19 measures, the only way to properly and safely test our content is to do so remotely. In this section, I will share the lessons learnt and the tools we used for moderated, remote usability testing. Zoom For video meetings and screen sharing with participants. Google Docs For participants to highlight, comment and give feedback on the content we’re testing. OBS Studio & YouTube Private Streaming For project teammates and stakeholders who want to sit-in for usability testing sessions. Usually, we would use the observation room in our office’s UT lab. But that option’s unavailable due to COVID-19… so how could we make room for UT observations online? To recreate the observation room’s one-way mirror environment, I used OBS Studio to stream the Zoom sessions to a private live streaming link on YouTube. We meet the participant for UT on Zoom, while observers watch the session on a private live stream. The streaming links are unlisted, private and strictly by invite only. We also make sure to inform and get the participant’s agreement. Get comfortable with silence For remote content testing, expect long stretches of silence while the participant focuses on reading the content page to page. Get comfortable with silence, be patient, and avoid fidgeting or interrupting their concentration. Sometimes, participants may instead feel awkward with silence and wonder if they’re being helpful. With more practice, you will start to know when is the right time to give proper feedback and assurance. You can even encourage them to think aloud and share their thoughts as they read. Test your content… even as you work from home! Content testing is not expensive but it requires time and effort. As a result, it’s common for project teams to put content testing aside as a ‘nice to have’. Yet, words play a critical part in how people understand, learn or use a product. We might not have time or budget to test every single piece of content, but we can start small by replacing lorem ipsum with actual instructions or including content questions in usability testing. At GovTech, I’ve been lucky that the 2 project teams I’ve worked with saw the importance of testing content. By paying attention to how people read, interpret, and respond to content, we can know how to better communicate, structure, and design information. Many thanks to: Michelle + Fugene for their guidance on usability testing Selig for note-taking and the funny gifs + baby photos during waiting time. Tobi, for the time spent recruiting participants and hard work liaising with agencies Lastly, I’m super grateful for a supportive LifeSG team, where everyone has put in hard work and long hours to constantly improve this product. Remote Content Usability Testing for LifeSG was originally published in LifeSG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Remote Content Usability Testing for LifeSG

By now, you would have heard that Moments of Life has been rebranded as LifeSG to provide one-stop personalised access to more than 40 government services. In the previous post, we shared about LifeSG’s new vision to serve citizens beyond key live moments. This post will focus on sharing how we handled rebranding as a team — from working our way around tight timelines to getting sign-off from various stakeholders and agency partners. Why rebrand Moments of Life into LifeSG? Lack of consistency — Over time, we realised users, stakeholders and agency partners called the product by different names: Moments of Life, MOL, Moments, or simply… ‘ Aiya, the birth registration app.’ This challenged our product’s ability to scale and drive word-of-mouth recommendations. Length of the name — The 15-character long name (‘Moments of Life’) was tricky. When the name and logo are printed on assets or placed next to other logos, it will either be shrunk to fit an allocated space (tiny, and therefore not readable) or risk being cut off or shortened to ‘MOL’. New product vision — Finally, we wanted the brand to communicate new product goals and vision. Instead of just providing birth registration or preschool search for families, our product now aims to deliver simpler government services that citizens can access anytime. We needed a new brand name that could reflect a bigger dream and vision. How did we rebrand Moments of Life into LifeSG? Once the product team was aligned on why we needed a rebrand, we quickly moved from the why to the how. Here are the steps we took: 1. Align everyone around the same goals and objectives The LifeSG marketing team engaged an ad agency to facilitate a rebranding workshop back in October 2019. To help everyone get aligned on the same goals, the rebranding workshop involved product stakeholders, agency partners, design and development team. Our objective was simple — we wanted the new name to be short, easy to remember and convey the idea that the app gives one-stop access to government services. Everyone got involved and submitted naming suggestions, followed by a few rounds of voting and feedback. 2.Turn feedback and product vision into something visible Despite the short timeline, we didn’t want to work in a vacuum. Instead of following the traditional client-vendor relationship, the ad agency’s facilitator participated in group discussions with LifeSG stakeholders, partners and design team. The LifeSG marketing team also worked closely with them to create the LifeSG brand story, as well as the new logo, colours and fonts. During this time, the UX Design team also provided feedback on design and copy guidelines. Constant discussions between Marketing, Design and Product Strategy helped everyone to work towards rebranding together. 3. The end result: LifeSG So, how did we land on LifeSG as our new name? Life — ‘ To offer personalised services at key life moments for citizens.’ SG — ‘To help citizens navigate simplified government digital services in Singapore.’ Red was chosen as the main colour to showcase Singapore’s national colour. We managed to pull-off this rebranding effort in 9 months, on top of the new features we had to build for LifeSG— the ‘Explore Services’ directory and Career Support guides. To achieve our product vision, LifeSG will continuously work on anticipating user needs and providing meaningful solutions. Curious to see more? Stop by life.gov.sg for more updates. LifeSG: Rebranding the product as a team was originally published in LifeSG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Humans of LifeSG

From birth registration to your personalised government benefits, here are the stories of how LifeSG impacted citizens from all walks of life.

Product & Engineering

Take a peek into the latest features of LifeSG and gain insight into the work that goes behind them.

Humans of LifeSG

From birth registration to your personalised government benefits, here are the stories of how LifeSG impacted citizens from all walks of life.

Product & Engineering

Take a peek into the latest features of LifeSG and gain insight into the work that goes behind them.

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