Designing Inclusive Digital Services for Everyone

Every year, Singapore’s government digital services undergo a round of Usability Checks (UC) conducted by GovTech, via a Mystery Shopper concept. Through the UCs, all digital services are rated against a set of criteria, which includes its accessibility requirements. The score cards of the digital services are then shared across the whole-of-government, spurring agencies to uplift the standard of their digital services.

Through these efforts, the satisfaction rating for our citizen and business services have improved over the years. This is illustrated in the 2020 Satisfaction Survey for Government to Citizen (G2C) and Government to Business (G2B) services where we achieved a score of 86% and 76% respectively. This is a 7% increase in both scores compared to 2018’s survey results.

Digital Service Standards (DSS)

The DSS helps government agencies implement digital services that meet the Digital Government Blueprint’s (DGB) goal of delivering digital services that are easy, seamless, and relevant for our citizens and businesses. It consists of policies, standards, and guidelines for government agencies to adhere to and fulfills a core need of Singapore’s Digital Government Journey – to design and deliver unified and consistent government digital services to citizens and businesses based on their user needs. The design principles of the DSS include Intuitive Design and Usability, Accessibility and Inclusivity, and Relevance and Consistency. The DSS is developed based on an iterative development approach through a cross-disciplinary team (e.g. policy specialists, user experience experts etc); and benchmarked against international standards to upkeep its quality and relevancy.

Singapore Government Design System (SGDS)

The SGDS ensures that all government services are united by a common UI language and user experience that is compliant to the DSS where applicable. It is made up of UI components, patterns and templates that are oriented towards citizen and business needs. By following curated design guidelines to maximise user experiences, government agencies that utilise the SGDS can transform their websites and deliver high-quality digital services easily. It also allows government agencies to standardize online service interfaces and implement ready templates, patterns and UI components that have already passed accessibility checks for time savings. This allows agencies to focus on other areas of concerns such as the architecture and security of government digital services.

Find out more about our inclusive digital services here:

• Digital Service Standard
• Singapore Government Design System