Service Victoria UX/UI & Digital
Standard transactions
Situation
Our current approach to designing online transactions often involves significant repetitive effort. Designers are frequently recreating similar patterns, components, steps, and modules, leading to wasted time and potential inconsistencies. This also makes it challenging to maintain and scale our digital transactions effectively.
By establishing a library of standard, repeatable design patterns, components, steps, and modules, we can dramatically reduce design effort and empower designers to focus on more strategic activities. This standardised approach will also enable the rapid assembly of new transactions and facilitate future scalability.
We created the Standard Transaction Templates to leverage these standardised elements. This tool will require all common, repeatable steps to be clearly defined, including their default inputs, information order, and potential variations. The designers will then be able to easily add or remove these elements as needed.
The standard transaction templates will be pre-populated with all available options for each step, allowing editors to easily configure specific transactions by removing any unnecessary elements. This shift towards standardised, modular design, created in Figma, represents a significant step towards a more efficient, scalable, and customer-centric digital platform.
Tasks
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Define user-tested and accessible design patterns that we can confidently incorporate into our standard library, ensuring that the Standard Transaction templates would promote effective and inclusive user experiences.
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Discover common design patterns, components, steps, and modules that were being repeatedly created, providing a foundational inventory for our standardisation efforts.
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The objective of this collaboration was to develop a technically feasible framework for the Standard Transaction templates, ensuring that the standardised front-end elements could be effectively integrated with our existing systems without creating undue complexity or performance issues.
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My purpose in this task was to enable designers to effectively utilise the Standard Transaction templates and the components, providing clear instructions and best practices to ensure consistent application and maximise the efficiency gains we were aiming for.
Actions
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The design team and I championed the idea of creating a centralised library of reusable design patterns and the development of the Standard Transaction templates in meetings with stakeholders across design, development, and product management.
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Facilitated several cross-functional workshops bringing together designers, developers, and business analysts to collaboratively define the core, repeatable steps and their variations for inclusion in the Standard Transaction templates.
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I actively provided ongoing support and guidance to designers as they began using the Standard Transaction templates for their projects, addressing their questions and gathering feedback on the usability and effectiveness of the tool.
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I dedicated time to meticulously documenting the intended usage, variations, and accessibility considerations for each of the initial design patterns and modules within the central library.
These designs are currently protected – if you’d like access, please contact me directly
Results
We successfully achieved a significant reduction in design effort. One of the most tangible successes was the considerable time saved by designers. By having pre-built, user-tested, and accessible templates for common steps and modules, designers no longer had to start from scratch for every transaction.
They could leverage the existing library, configure it through the Standard Transaction templates, and focus their energy on the more unique and complex aspects of new features or flows. This freed up their time for more strategic activities like user research and innovation.
The Standard Transaction templates directly led to a more consistent and cohesive user experience across our platform. Regardless of the specific transaction, users encountered familiar patterns, layouts, and interactions. This fostered trust and made it easier for customers to navigate and complete their tasks, ultimately contributing to higher customer satisfaction.
