Transfiguration

Business Grants Portal is a website that brings government grants for businesses into one place, making it easier for business owners to apply for the grants they need. Such grants are normally on-boarded with multiple agencies and ministry’s requirements in view.

Apart from applying, applicants can also amend or submit claims for their applications in the portal.

The Story

With the enhancement of the Enterprise Development Grant, applicants still had to submit for project amendment via another portal. However, that would change as their system ESG Portal would be interfacing to BGP instead.

The Goal

To build a Change Request form to cater for applicants who are looking to amend their Enterprise Development Grant applications.

Definition

Since Change Request is applicable for other grants on BGP, we assessed the existing form layout.

Research

For starters, we examined the forms in BGP for the following grants:

  • Market Readiness Assistance (MRA)

  • Aviation Development Fund (ADF)

  • Business Development Fund (BIF)


Other than Contact Details and Declare & Review, the Change Request Information page differentiates from each grant with the inclusion of an “Others” section in BIF and MRA.

As these grants consist of cost categories, applicants are guided to click on “Refer to Letter of Offer in Letters and Documents section” in Project Costs (similar to Others) for access to application’s documents in another page. This results in a lot of back and forth checking that is pretty cumbersome.

In contrast, cost items in ESG Portal’s interface for project amendment consist of detailed information that is captured from BGP application.

Synthesis

With these findings, we started to examine ways of mapping its details onto BGP’s cost categories.

Ideation

Though we could directly mirror the fields from ESG Portal, we had to consider the correlation between Change Request and the application’s Cost section. For instance, we had to make sure that the details in both forms’ Salary align with one another, which is not the case when we compare ESG Portal with BGP application.

Mapping Information + Cost Variation

Hence, we standardised the labels and attempted to map the fields directly from ESG Portal. In the Change Request form, we understand the function is to check on the particular section to make edits. As such, we implemented the same approach where users can amend the Cost Categories upon doing so.

However, we realised that the system would not be able to detect the changes made should users amend any of the cost items. This led us to create another variation where users would have to perform an action in order to enable amendment. This would also prevent users from making accidental edits.

We also discussed with the agency on the fields so as to get a clearer direction on how we could incorporate the fields into the Change Request form.

Cost Categories Variation

As far as preventing users from making accidental edits is concerned, it carried along to how we wanted to design the Cost Categories section. Initially, I was wondering how could we improve its design and we had the impression that users might not want to be overwhelmed by the display of every cost category by default. This led us to minimise the design by including a field where users can select the cost categories so that they would only see the ones they want to edit.

On the other hand, there were concerns by product owners that users might prefer to see everything upon one glance (similar to BGP application) so they will know what to edit. Hence, we did another variation with the display of every cost category by default.

Usability Testing

As we were unsure of what users would prefer, we decided to test them during the usability testing session. The goal is to assess areas of improvement and recommendations via scenarios with the latest wireframes.

Context

Here’s a rundown of the UT participants:


  • 7x EDG applicants

  • All have made project amendments on ESG Portal

  • A mix of job titles, gender, and industries were represented

Project Amendment on ESG Portal

  • All found ESG Portal difficult to use, rating from 1/10 to 4/10

  • 1x had to liaise with ESG officer on usage of portal

  • 1x found ESG Portal not readable due to small font sizes and icons

Changing vendor under Training cost item (Variation 2)

  • 5x performed task to change vendor to “123 Corporation” within 2 to 3 minutes, feeling that it’s straightforward

  • 1x took more than 5 minutes to perform task and had to be prompted and guided to proceed to Cost Details page to change vendor

"I want to make a change" checkbox

  • 5x understood that read-only details are from approved application

  • 1x thought that details are submitted but not approved, suggesting a note to be added to inform user that details are approved values

  • 1x thought that by checking, editing values, unchecking and checking again, edited values should remain

  • 1x suggested that upon unchecking, a warning message should appear to inform that edited values will be lost

Variation 1 vs Variation 2

  • 6x prefer variation 2 as displaying all cost categories enables them to glance through all at one go

  • 1x prefers variation 1 as instruction is able to guide her on what to do.

  • 1x thought that she could only select one category for amendment in variation 1 and would have to create another application for another amendment

Outcome

Upon assessing each session, we made some changes on the wireframes:

  • Add a warning message to inform user that edited values will be lost if they proceed to uncheck checkbox

  • To implement variation 2 as part of the design for Cost Categories