For US municipality residents, HeyGov has always been the platform where their day-to-day transactions were made. However, citizens of larger municipalities often complained that there were too many services and could not find what they were looking for.
Municipality clerks have the authority to add as many items or services that citizens can purchase as they like. This resulted in a very cluttered interface and scalability issues. Citizens were no longer able to find the services they used to pay for.
While this looks okay, it’s very uncommon for municipalities to have just a few services.
A more common list of services offered by a municipality.
While the problem was always in the back of our minds, it didn’t really present itself as a problem early on as most of the municipalities on the platform were small-sized and did not have a long list of services.
Curate the list of services based on previously paid services. We aimed to not only solve the issue of scalability, but also increase # of payments month-to-month.
We would curate the first 8 services based on the user’s behavior. Things like how often a user pays for said service and how much would dictate whether or not the service would appear on this list.
Initially, we would not have enough information to start showing the most used services. However, we would show the most popular ones, and hide the rest behind another page.
We set two primary metrics for success for this new redesign. Higher # of payments made per month, and improved time to action.
A month after launch, we saw an increase of 12% in number of payments made per month, and users, on average, spent 20s less looking for the service they want.
This experiment has generally led us to think more about how to approach problems using more personalization that should hopefully lead us to higher revenue. While that wasn't a metric we were tracking for this problem, it's definitely something that was put in the backlog as a result.
A few of the key takeaways I got from this challenge:
- More technically challenging solutions usually require more robust data to get buy-in.
- Set some time to revisit the backlog every once in a while, some problems may be glaring right at you, especially as you scale.