5 weeks
City of Lacombe, Alberta is partnering with us to digitalize municipal services. We already established a business license portal via mobile app for the city. This project is to create a utility portal and implement it to the app. According to the interactive prototype test, the account setting feature saves each user 12 minutes on average, while every payment registration saves city staff 5 minutes compared to the existing method.
To understand the problems clients faced regarding billing utilities, I met the Utility department lead, the technical lead and 2 utility clerks from City of Lacombe. Â During the client meeting, I understood the issue with the current solution and their future vision. Then I conducted user interview with 8 citizens and figured out the problems citizens had in terms of managing utility.
Target users: Current Lacombe residents and businesses
Client: City of lacombe
Opportunities:‍
After gathering all problems, the team and I grouped them into 5. Then I mapped the user journey to get a holistic view of what support we can expect from infrastructure and where the solution sits in the problem space.
Problems (from the client)‍
Problems (from the citizens)‍
As the clients required, we will use mobile app as our platform for this project. I drew out the happy path to reach the end goal — complete paying for utilities easily.
The team and I brainstormed solutions based on the problems we found in the Understanding phase. The server team added their thoughts about solving the client's problems from the backend perspective.
Core feature:‍
We confirmed with the clients about the user flow and the feature list. Clients added a few new points:
Bill payment amount
Citizens don't have to pay the full balance. They can pay any amount more than 0 to avoid penalties.
Linking account by mistake
‍Based on the experience of linking business licenses, some people linked to the wrong account when they typed the license number wrong.
I made clickable wireframes and walked the team (developers, product manager and QA) through every page. Externally I tested with 4 citizens using single-task method. Here are a list of insights we found during the test:
I set up 3 tasks — Link account, Pay for bill and Check the receipt of a paid bill using Maze. Then I sent the test link to 11 test participants to perform tasks following instructions without facilitator being present.
Participants: 11
Results:
Users link their account using the account number and access code shown on their physical bill. The 2 pieces of data prevent linking to the wrong account due to typing mistakes.
When a bill is available, users can  pay from Account Overview or they can read in details and then pay for it. The payment amount is flexible based on the client’s preference. Any payment amount(greater than 0) is counted as task completion.
I used Protopie to create the prototype, which involved using formulas and variables to link account(s) and facilitate payment calculations.
The project is released after I left the project. Here are metrics I helped to define to track the product's performance after it’s released.
The work related to manually collecting utilities payment from citizens takes a lot of time
Process payments online and automatically register the payment
Comparison between the amount of time utility staff spend manually collecting one payment and collecting one payment through the utility portal
Mailing out utilities bills costs time, money and human resources
Email citizens utility bills if they opt in E-copy through the utility portal
Comparison between the time and financial cost utility staff spend on mailing one utility bill and emailing one bill
The city is adopting a new tiered rate structure, but they don’t have a channel to inform citizens and address inquiries
Inform the users about the new tiered rate structure on the utility portal
Percentage of portal users know about how the new rate structure works (Survey)
Current payment methods including online banking are not satisfying
Provide an online payment portal that supports multiple payment methods and auto-payment
Comparison between the satisfaction rate on pervious payment methods and the online payment portal
Physical mail of utilities bills are hard to find after a while
Give access to citizens’ bill history on the utility portal
The easiness of finding history bills through the online portal
Before we talked to users, we thought users were happy with existing online payment methods. We didn’t design questions to ask users who adopted payment plans. But when interviewing users, we realized this group could be our target users too. That’s why we support multiple payment methods and auto-payment in our product.
To use this product, we asked users to input information, such as account number and payment info. During the rapid prototype testing, one of the participants hesitated to provide his information because he didn’t know if it was secure. That taught me that a good product should not only be functional, but also be transparent. Winning user trust is key.
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