Pune is one of the best among the 100 Smart Cities in India. Loosely translated, it means the citizens’ engagement with the government for better urban living is a digitally mediated experience.
The government of India launched the Digital India programme in 2015 for transforming India into a digitally empowered society and knowledge economy. E-governance is a pillar of this programme. Pune is one of the fastest-growing cities in India, with a sizable young population. The government and city stakeholders aimed for e-governance to allow for ease of engagement and service delivery to this urban populace.
PricewaterhouseCoopers Private Limited (PWC) commissioned dharma.h Software Technologies to help with experience design for the portal and mobile app development of PMC Care. This portal and a corresponding app lets users access services like tax payment, obtain information and updates over mobile. We worked alongside PWC in developing and designing the experience.
Project Description
Experience design helps propel businesses and governments into a new digital era. It’s about service discovery, digital product and service adaptation, reliance and reliability and above all, the ease in which it works and the value it brings to the user.
Furthering the vision of a Smart City under the Digital India Mission, PMC Care aims to enrich the “citizens to government” interface and experience. It is an intuitive, single-window citizens app and portal for all government services.
Approach:
Understand: Understanding encompasses knowledge transfer on key aspects such as the objective the experience must achieve. To assist in Pune’s transformation to a Smart City, we along with PWC, understood the city’s DNA, history and value system first. From the technological standpoint, we needed an understanding of the platform, process flows and related aspects, which PWC’s development team provided us. This gave us 360-degree comprehension of the value the digital experience aimed to deliver.
Interpret: Interpretation is the synthesis of the raw data collected in the understanding phase. It helps define clear and precise dependent limitations, outline areas for possible exploration and development and collates thoughts into boxes that help to move to the next phase. The end goal for us was to design a unique and valuable objective-driven experience.
Ideate: Ideation is creative thinking in action. With the value proposition to be achieved being clear and defined, and the problems evaluated, we had to work on generating new ideas to enrich the experience. One the one hand, dharma.h explored technology-enabled solutions to empower users and heighten the experience objective. One the other hand, PWC team members from diverse backgrounds went into deep research to see whether the solutions were engaging, user-friendly, and ready for a future-state journey.
Prototype: Prototyping is an essential phase that helps early evaluation of ideas and assumptions. This helped us identify design flaws and limitations we missed in the earlier phases. For us, it was more like a burn-in test of assumptions, ideas in implementation.
Evolve: Our next phase took us to development, with the citizen at the heart of it. This was architectured with empathy for the end-user, keeping in mind the core objective of an e-governance product. The experience design was created, developed and tested across devices and platforms and then integrated in collaboration with the PWC Development Team.
Urban governance involves a multitude of departments and services. Each of these departments and processes is unique. This translates to a huge base of information. The solution dharma.h proposed had to ensure that this information is streamlined and processed into a unified window.
The development team worked closely with the design team on feature sets. These were coded, tested and validated by both teams. The process helped us achieve the goal of designing a citizen-focused portal for Pune Municipal Corporation.
Areas of innovation and value creation:
Service Discovery: Pune Municipal Corporation has a plethora of services to offer. Service discovery was quintessential to the experience design. The layout was done with both the millennials and Gen X users in mind. We aimed to enhance the experience of service discovery and completion of the user’s objective with minimal barrier.
Customized Interface: Once the user has used PMC Care, they can come back to a tailor-made experience. This customized interface is based on the user’s past interaction with the property across different media.
Unified Interface Experience: The experience design integrates the various services into one experience, design and language. Some of these service processes were different from each other. dharma.h re-engineered the interface at certain phases to deliver a unified interface experience, irrespective of the processes.
Citizen’s Participation: The government wants citizen’s participation to be the driving force of the Smart City. It wants to involve the people of the city to create a better urban living experience. Thus, we focused on citizen’s engagement. The challenge for us was to create an experience that allows for this engagement and yet is simple and effective.
Future Compatible: Newer services will be integrated into the portal with time. We worked to make the experience design future-compatible to multiple processes and accommodative of growth. The design adapts to a growing services gamut and requirements of the city.
The core idea was to present all features and services, allow for user-led discovery, enable the citizens to understand what these features and services do and finally, access and use these with ease on a single screen.
Value Delivered:
We delivered the mandated user interface as well as the user experience. dharma.h developed the UI and UX for the portal and the mobile app. We worked in tandem with the PWC development team to deliver the experience we had visualized. This was tested on different browsers, resolutions, devices and network conditions. The core objective set by the government of being able to provide collated services under one roof was delivered. Design guidelines such as visual hierarchy, semantics, clear and precise definition were married to functionality and the outcome was a product that can be used by the masses with ease across bandwidth in age and background.
