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Half a year in after I joined LifeSG as a UX designer, I had the opportunity to plan and facilitate a 1-hour “quick” design principles workshop for the team. This writing describes how it went in late Sept 2021, when we were all working from home. The collaborative tools we used were Miro board and Zoom. PS: we are still working from home at the date of publish. Design principles - what and why it matters? Design principles are abstract guidelines to describe the values that are core to the design. They should be viewed as goals to be delivered to the audience by the product. They are meant to help align and frame design priorities to ensure consistency and delightfulness throughout product experience. Since design principles represent core values shared within the team, I thought it would be meaningful if designers (including our UX writer) could come together to collectively brainstorm on the design principles, in a workshop setting. Workshop Facilitation A week before the workshop I described the purpose and importance of the design principles and asked the participants to write down at least 3 design principles on the virtual board prepared. The design principles have to Express the purpose of our product Consider how the design principles impact users Be authentic and genuine Be easy to remember Complement with existing content guidelines A resource vault that I find useful to get inspiration from, and would recommended to anyone, is During the workshop Before the workshop began, I reminded on the purpose of the workshop, and ran through the itinerary and house rules. Itinerary for the workshop 📢 Activity: Pitch yo’ design principles It was a round table mini pitching session where each participant was asked to explain the rationale for their chosen principles. ~2 minutes were allocated for each participant. In the middle of the “pitching” session, I realised that there was themes developing among the design principles. We had to drop activity 3 and 4 as I believed that they might not be constructive, since there was already some consensus forming. The participants were then asked to perform affinity mapping, which is grouping similar design principles, instead. 💰 Activity: $100 vote This has always been one of my favourite activities for workshop facilitation, because it deals with… real money. Nope, just kidding. I just like to observe participants putting a value on how much an idea worth to them. For this workshop, it would mean a design principle’s value. $100 vote can help to spice up dot voting. Each participant would have $100 (post-it). They were asked to invest any amount of money in more than 1 design principles that they believe in, within the $100 budget. They had to create new post-its with the chosen amount and paste them next to the selected design principles. They were also allowed to invest in their own written design principles. No discussion were allowed, but at the end of the activity, participants were selected to explain their choices. We identified 5 key themes that should be core values of LifeSG design, based on the total amount calculated for each grouping (the higher the amount, the more value it has). The 5 themes with the highest value 💎 Activity: Refinement of the design principles Since we were ahead of time, we refined the design principles into proper statements together, during the workshop. This step was originally planned to be done after the workshop. The purpose of having proper statements is to ensure that the design principles are narrative and easy to remember, so that they can be applied by anyone in the team. At the end of the workshop, our UX writer, Carrie, gave the final touch to the statements with her magic dust. 5 design principles for LifeSG Disclaimer: the following doodles are not official representation. Not in order of importance or priority: #1 Empathy: put users first Guide users through different moments of their life. #2 Accessibility: be inclusive Keep in mind the varying needs of our diverse groups of users when designing. #3 Simplicity: be straightforward Make information digestible for users to understand. #4 Reliability: provide trustworthy information Ensure information is accurate, timely and suited for user’s circumstance. #5 Conversational: use warm and friendly language Use approachable and simple language that is easy for users of all ages. Some tips from this workshop (1) Ask your potential participants to do homework I don’t like long workshops, because it costs participants’ time and some participants may lose focus, so I try to keep them as short as possible. By preparing in advance, it would save time for more important workshop activities. However, do take note that, as most people have their own day-to-day tasks to complete, not all participants would be able complete the homework before hand. Help participants by making sure that your homework is simple enough to be completed within a short time frame. Also, do make periodic reminders for your participants. (2) Don’t be afraid of improvising and changing your workshop plan on the spot Sometimes things might not run as planned during the workshop. Do be prepared to make some changes. Lastly, if you are thinking of organising your own design principles workshop, you may want to include other stakeholders, such as product managers and engineers, depending on how your organisation is structured. It may help in contributing views from more angles. I’m not workshop facilitation expert. Please do drop us a comment if you find this article helpful, or if there are any feedbacks or questions! Thank you for reading! ✨ Special thanks to: Michelle Chen and Fugene Choy, for the support and trust in this mission Carrie Lee, for her Midas touch on the design principles copy And also, all other LifeSG designers for being so gung-ho in participation. They are Liting Kway, Selig Chow, Timothy Loh, Shiwei Ng, Cherie Chung and Geena Lok (LifeSG Intern) All of you without whom this workshop would not have been possible. I’m grateful and thankful to be part of this team. References: Conducting a remote design principles workshop for LifeSG was originally published in LifeSG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Conducting a remote design principles workshop for LifeSG

Who says you can’t have a big party with COVID-19? We did :) It’s been about 2 years since COVID-19 forced our team at LifeSG (over 50 of us!) to retreat to our homes and to collaborate via virtual means. We haven’t been able to meet for big scale sprint activities or small by-the-water-cooler chats…and the word party quickly fell into disuse. But what’s December without a year-end party to unwind and have fun? We didn’t want to let the circumstances bring our spirits down, so a representative from each of the teams in LifeSG and BookingSG (our sister project) came together to organise the annual BookingSG x LifeSG Christmas party on 21st December 2021. With teammates across the globe and with all of us still living with Covid, this was organised and held virtually, with aid of our favourite online collaborative tools! Pre-party LifeSG and BookingSG were split up into smaller teams in preparation for the party games. Both projects have grown with new members in the past year, so teammates from various teams are randomly put together for the party to interact with others beyond their working teams. 6 teams, with holiday as the theme. We created slack channels for each team to get together before the party to prepare to wow the judges (i.e. the organisers) with their creative zoom backgrounds and costumes to win the fanciest team award. From wearing real winter coats to using special zoom features, check out the photos below and you’ll see the effort put in by the teams to dress up as one for the party! The Christmas party attendees (part 1) The Christmas party attendees (part 2) The party games Having a party virtually limits the type of games you can play. Using miro, the organisers got each team to decorate a Christmas tree together as an ice breaker. With the little amount of time given for the task, each team had to quickly strategise and split up to find images to decorate their tree. It was heartwarming to see team members helping each other out, even if it was something simple like moving one picture behind another. The decorated trees We also brought back Charades, which was well-loved at last year’s party. Other than acting out and mouthing the given word for their team to guess, the pictionary element was added this year too. Can you guess the food drawn here? It’s sushi Teams also pitched against each other at Kahoot!, where the googling experts showed off their skills at finding the quiz answers. As there can only be one team representative answering the questions on Kahoot!, the teams collaborated efficiently using the slack channels created for them for the pre-party to quickly help their teammate choose the right answer. It was a lot of teamwork showcased for one Kahoot! quiz! Leaderboard from Kahoot! The most creative game (in my opinion!) would be Spot the Difference. Each of the organisers made a change to their appearance and each team gets 1 chance to guess what the change was. Most teams learnt to save a screenshot of the organisers for the 2nd round of the game! Organisers liaising on the changes to make for Spot the Difference game End of the party It was 3 hours of fun and laughter, with 2 teams being tied on the number of points and having to go into a round of sudden-death pictionary to win the 1st prize! Prizes, sponsored by our recently-promoted teammates, were also given out. All-in-all, it was a good break from work and a great time getting to know people that we may not work closely together with. Ultimately, we learnt that with all the available virtual collaboration tools, the word party doesn’t have to fall into disuse. We just have to give it new meaning. Despite the physical distance, there was fun and games, and we had a jolly good time. We hope that these ties continue to grow and make it easier for collaboration across teams. With the end of the Christmas party, comes also the end of 2021. Hereby wishing all our readers a great 2022! Hopefully, when I write about our Christmas party again next year, it’ll be about the sort of party that we miss, where the full team celebrates together, in-person, at Hive. Cheers! Celebrating Christmas @ LifeSG was originally published in LifeSG on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Celebrating Christmas @ LifeSG

Image from hive.tech.gov.sg Here in the Government Digital Services (GDS), we build great digital product by transforming the way how products are build in the Government. Here we practice agile, design thinking, DevSecOps and etc in building wide range of products for the Government. Very often, we hear comments in the industry, it is widely known that such change require tremendous support across the entire organisation and you can already imagine how challenging we are looking at, across Whole-Of-Government (WOG). It is commonly known that the Government culture is diametrical distinct from private sector and especially on the infamous red tapes, we can never blindly follow industry theory and expect a positive outcome. We execute, practice and tailor them to ensure the outcome of transformation are practically fit for the other parts of Government to be replicated with minor variations. Out of the 12 agile principles, one of them stood out as most important but extremely challenging which is to build a self-organising team. Something that is seemingly easy but super challenging in our context. To understand why we need to walk the history. Glimpse of a past According to this article, DBS bank started outsourcing many of their IT / IS back in 2003 and significantly started the IT outsourcing revolution. With consideration on multiple aspects (eg: economic, development and workforce) the Government also jump into the outsourcing bandwagon. Running outsourcing model for close to 20 years, naturally the expertise acquired are around the needs of outsourcing approach. We became very proficient in telling people what we want in great specific details forming part of the agreement in the form of requirements specification. We also developed the culture on driving based on agreed timelines therefore the need for project plans, frameworks and monitoring processes in attempt to control and minimise any form of project delays. It should be very clear now, the management style needed for this approach. These are just some of the many challenges and it is almost against the law of physics to make the change happen over a very short span of time. Processes, policies and compliance are established for good reason and the consideration for change cannot be just because one part of the Government wants to do agile. Cultural and management style is a lot harder to shift it is the the of question right fit rather than right management style. So what is a Superhero? So, what do we do to create self-organisation teams with all these external factors that is beyond our control? This is the time to introduce our superheroes. The cadence of running large, multiple-agile teams is already eating up precious time from the teams. Therefore we created superheroes to represent the teams in certain cadence and fronting stakeholders engagement. Most importantly, able to bring high level context back to the team with very minimal translation loss. The purpose of doing so is to protect the team’s time. On top of that, they also take up tackling of red tapes and provide high level and aspirational targets for the respective team. They create a buffer in order for the team be separated from the external factors and the space for the team to self-organise. Now, you may find our Superheroes very similar to a Scrum Master role, however we do not agree. Why? Because after completing more than 100 sprints, we had landed on a maturity state where a Scrum Master role is not needed. Actually, more accurately to say everyone in the team is a Scrum Master. Our Superheroes wear multiple hats including a Scrum Master’s. Apart from their leadership and ability to create the bubble for the team, the key differences are while they have a very specialised discipline, they are also having a level of understanding into other cross functional disciplines. They also need to be versed about Government compliance and processes to be able to tank the red tapes for the team. To be honest, this is never the an attractive role. While not anyone may fit, nor (for those eligible) may be aspired to take up it up. It means scarification to be made losing time and opportunities further deepening crafts. Therefore each rising Superhero is a true leader putting others before themselves. Surely rare, we were glad to receive one recently. How to become one? Apart from the experience, abilities and knowledge being the foundation, our Superheroes require a certain maturity level of thinking and understanding as they will be exposed to many interesting perspective and working with different people. While not everyone may become one from the onset, we have the right environment to mould our next generations of Superheroes. If you are up for the challenge, do get in touch with me! Rise of a new superhero 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.

Culture @ LifeSG

How do we navigate our way to the future? Here are some of LifeSG’s guides to a flourishing life, through daily rituals and future planning, self-love and family care.

Product & Engineering

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