MINDEF

My Role

I worked with a team of designers to create a CRMS that for employee case management.

Duration:

6 months

Responsibilities:

UI/UX Design, Design Systems, Enterprise Platforms

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The Project

An introduction of the client and our deliverables

High-level Summary

MINDEF is a Singapore Government Agency that is responsible for overseeing the national defense in Singapore. They have over 250 employees, and serve all National Service men.

Accenture was hired to help MINDEF design and develop a new Customer Relationship Management System (CRMS) that would streamline their existing workflow, and improve the services provided to their employees and NS men.

Our Deliverables

We had the following responsibilities:

1 Researching and uncovering the pain points of the existing CRMS being used
2 Designing a CRMS for the client to manage the cases they receive from employees
3 Designing multiple dashboards to monitor and analyse these cases
4 Adhering to the client directive of having following NS Hub DLS as design direction

My Role and Contributions

For this project, I took on a more collaborative role to align expectations and deliverables across the different teams. Some of my main responsibilities include:

  • Client workshop planning and execution to find out about their pain points and vision for Senior Management Dashboard, synthesising the information and proposing potential solutions to effectively solve the client’s issues
  • Managing and working closely with internal teams to understand the limitations of enterprise platform services, and balancing these limitations with the requests of the client

DLS Mapping

Modifying ServiceNow to fit our needs

ServiceNow x NS Hub

ServiceNow is the enterprise solutioning platform that MINDEF has chosen to be used to streamline their processes. They offer many services and solutions out of the box, and the designers had to figure out what were the best features and functionalities to be used that would be best suited for the client's needs.

We also had to ensure that Service Now adhered to MINDEF's existing Design Language System, NS Hub. As there is no “one-size-fits-all” Design Language System, the team had to evaluate the NS Hub DLS to better integrate it into the ServiceNow Platform.

1 to 1 Mapping

To ensure optimisation to ServiceNow, we mapped 162 ServiceNow components with the NS Hub DLS. The design team evaluated components individually and manually re-assigned colours, adjusted typography, layout and spacings to suit the client's brand identity, while maintaing accessibility.

Before Adjustment
After Adjustment
Before Adjustment
After Adjustment

Key Screens

The design team also visualised several key screens to convey potential look and feel of the system. This has helped the client to make informed decisions when proceeding with the design directive given.

Before
After
Before
After

Dashboard Workshop

Figuring out the pain points

Planning and Execution

In order to find out the client's painpoints of their existing dashboards and analysis platform, we conducted a workshop to better understand the various scenarios in which they would use the dashboard for.

Based on our initial understanding, we created 2 A0 posters of high-level scenarios, each with a main theme that the user would want to achieve when doing their case analysis on the dashboard. These posters were used as a drawing board during the workshop, where the client's could pen their thoughts onto post its and stick it onto these posters. This process served to help guide the client's in figuring out and consolidating what exactly were the pain points they faced in a systematic manner.


After gathering the pain points from the above activity, we proceeded to prioritise the pain points using our Prioritisation Matrix. This matrix was to help us to figure out what was the most important information and features to have on the dashboard, using 2 measures - the impact this pain point has on decision making, and the frequency which the user will look at this piece of information. This leaves the matrix with 4 quadrants as seen below, and the client would be able to visualise the importance of their pain points against each other as they place the post its into their relevant quadrants.


Synthesis

After conducting a full day workshop with the client, we proceeded to synthesise all the information by looking at the gathered pain points, organising, interpreting and categorising them. We clustered similar pain points, and this helped us to identify relevant solutions or considerations for each category.

The synthesis process lead us to the following 3 key themes:

Data Availability / Granularity

Insights related to the lack of external system integration, data inaccuracy and unavailability.

Dashboard Capabilities

Insights related to the functions and features to customise the dashboard catering to the different needs of Senior Management.

Generative Data and Analytics

Insights related to the data visualisations and potential generative diagnosis that can be further explored.

Our Findings

With the 3 key themes, we could further breakdown and summarise the pain points and proposed functionalities to be taken into account when we design the dashboard.

Dashboard

Designing dashboards post workshop

The dashboard was to be built on the enterprise platform Amazon Quicksight. Quicksight is a business intelligence tool that creates data visualisations and dashboards for their users.

Limitations

As with any enterprise product, Quicksight comes with it's pros and cons. While Quicksight has many technical features such as machine learning, there was a lot of design limitations to this platform. When it came to designing the dashboard, it was very much like PowerPoint, where everything was static and each chart or component had to be manually adjusted to the right place.

We had to be creative in how we decided to layout each dashboard, playing around with images, typography and colour to ensure that the design of the dashboard was aligned to the visual directive of being consistent with NS Hub, as well as being easily understood by the client.

Our Guiding Principles

After we deepened our understanding of the Quicksight platform and it's limitations, we came up with the following Guiding Principles to guide our dashboard design process. These Principles take into account the client's requirements and the design limitations of Quicksight, and were also communicated to the client and internal teams to help ensure consistency across all the dashboards.

NS Hub Colour The aim is to maintain the NS Hub colour scheme while designing the dashboard.
Visual Impact The goal is not just to present information, but to motivate users to take meaningful actions based on the insights they gather. With a focus on an aesthetically pleasing design that maintains an organised presentation of information, we can inspire a positive response while extracting valuable insights without unnecessary complexity or clutter.
Value Amplification The impact is elevated by ensuring that the information displayed on the dashboard directly contributes to the organisation's goals and objectives. It goes beyond just providing data; it translates data into actionable information information that can guide meaningful actions and decisions.

Design Process

When designing the dashboards, we took on an iterative approach to progressively improve the dashboard design, while keeping in mind our Guiding Principles. Below are some examples of the our dashboard designs and how we made use of our Principles to guide our process.

Guidelines and Templates

After obtaining the client's approval of the dashboard design, we consolidated the various colours, images, guidelines and templates that the developers would need to follow to build the dashboard. Below are some examples of the guidelines done up.

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