DTO offers sneak peek of streamlined govt services

The federal government’s Digital Transformation Office has published a preview of what a redesigned government transaction portal might look like.

What gov.au on the mobile might look like (Source: DTO)

The DTO team has now completed four weeks of user research and five weeks of designing and building to come up with a prototype of gov.au, a new customer entry point into digital government transactions.

The prototyping phase has been narrowed down to the government interactions required to start a business and to move to Australia for work.

The government already operates Australia.gov.au as a common location for aggregated links to public sector information and services, but the DTO is aiming to take this concept futher.

"From small business owners to migrants and retirees, there was a common theme: people feel frustrated with the many different government processes across federal, state and local levels that they have to undertake,” the DTO’s head of service design Leisa Reichelt wrote in a post.

“We learned people often struggle to get a ‘mental model’ of everything that government needs them to know and do, because this information is often spread over several websites.

“They feel they’re finding out what they’re required to do in just the nick of time, often through asking someone in their personal or professional network.”

The DTO is designing an interface that will respond to user-entered details about their circumstances and what they want to achieve, in order to create a “mental model” of the steps a user will need to take and the documents they will need to provide prior to initiating their transaction.

The office wants to create a consistent look and feel that can scale and be reproduced across a growing number of government services.

The alpha prototype has been demonstrated to stakeholders across the public service. Reichelt said the feedback was “positive and supportive”.

It will now have to pass the digital service standard criteria before moving onto a beta phase of delivery.