Project Overview
Completed HDB resale experience discovery, which focuses on improving the flat resale buying and selling experience for thousands of families looking to transact their HDB properties by digitising physical appointments.
My Contributions
Service Design, User Research, User Testing interviews, User Interface Design
About the Team
3 User Experience designers
To build a one-stop gateway for all of National Library Board (NLB)'s vast wealth of resources, to position NLB as Singapore's Knowledge Resource.
Completed HDB resale experience discovery, which focuses on improving the flat resale buying and selling experience for thousands of families looking to transact their HDB properties. In 2023, HDB completed 26,253 transactions of resale flats, impacting thousands of families and households.
With this change, we improve the experience of both parties:
Singaporean Households- The core of the new experience focuses on the digitisation of physical appointments.
This grants applicants the ability to complete a flat transaction remotely, while reducing cognitive load for the households from the documents required for the transaction, while streamlining legacy processes through digitisation of processes such as the use of digital appointments, digital signatures and electronic payment methods to facilitate a shorter appointment time.
HDB officers- By digitising the appointment, and more integrated collection of documents needed for transaction, this reduces the load on the Customer Relations Officer to validate and manage documents.
UX designer in a team of 3, working in a lean and highly efficient team to gather requirements and align objectives from stakeholders on the envisioned state of the Resale experience.
- As-is process mapping through UX discovery, translating it into service design blueprints and high-level workflows to understand system dependencies and explore inefficiencies in flows.
- Solution envisioning with tech teams and exploring systems such as digital signatures and payment processes.
- Prototyping of envisioned state based on alignment with stakeholders
- Creation of user testing artefacts and conducting multiple rounds of user testing to validate designs with end users
- To champion and advocate for operational changes to facilitate a new user experience not only benefitting the users, but operational staff and HDB as an organisation
The number of steps the buyer and the seller takes is different, 10 steps and 12 steps respectively. For explanation purposes, the user flow for both buyers and sellers are generalised into 7 large steps.
As HDB supports the nation’s accelerating efforts to provide as many affordable and accessible housing schemes to citizens, it leverages on multiple systems to maintain new policy changes.
This results in the need to consolidate and map vast amounts of information, understanding complex systems, logic and legacy processes within HDB.
The vast number of housing schemes offered by HDB also entails a myriad of exception handling from edge cases. This meant that our design had balance being structured enough to accommodate quick processing of common task, while also providing flexibility for unique edge cases.
As HDB intends to transition from physical appointments to digital ones in efforts to optimise the use of manpower resources, our design had to factor in digital education for the transition into digital appointments. Setting the correct expectations and having guides on digital preparedness for the users was key in education efforts.
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Issue one — Heavy reliance on property agents
Individuals looking to buy or sell flats rely heavily on their property agents and their expertise to facilitate the process of transacting the flat due to the sheer amount of information required to complete the process. Individuals who do not have the means to engage a property agent to facilitate with transactions are faced with a steep learning curve and financial costs — avoiding buying or selling a property altogether.
Issue two — Lack of timely feedback during lengthy process
Sellers and buyers of resale flats are subjected to a series of 4 to 7 steps to complete the transaction. Documents such as financial statements, legal documents and payments from both parties have to be verified and completed before the transaction can proceed to the next step. This results in extensive waiting between each step.
However, the current HDB experience does not afford both parties with timely updates and statuses of the on-going transaction, leaving customers feeling anxious about the progress.
Issue three — Sellers have to make certain payments in-person
Sellers are required to complete all payments for their flat before it can be sold, which involves fees such as Town Council's Service and Conservancy Charges (S&CC) which has to be done in-person. This creates great user friction for flat sellers as they are required to approach their Town Council's physically for payments.
Issue four — Heavy cognitive load during final transaction appointment
During the final appointment where the keys are exchanged, there are several legal documents which the HDB officer has to go through with both parties.
This puts heavy cognitive loads on both the buyers and sellers as they are required to process and agree to the terms stated in the legal documents before they can proceed with the transaction.
Issue five — Alignment of physical appointment
Currently, the final appointment is held at HDB, where both parties meet physically to exchange keys and finalise the legal documents. This results in both parties having to align on an agreed time for the transaction to proceed, leading to user friction.
NLB had prior User Experience case studies done by consultancies, which our team used to value add and validate our user research analysing NLB’s web experience.
Through our research, we identified two main pain-points of the website:
Our discovery team was tasked to assess and ideate an operationally feasible solution for the resale flat buying experience within 6 months.
2 months • (July - August 2024)
Research and discovery
Shadowing of 8 HDB officers and 8 users during their resale appointments to map out their current journey and identify pain points.
1 month • (August - September 2024)
Synthesis and proposal
Based on the sessions our team observed, we identified points within the journey which could be enhanced to reduce inefficiencies. We solutioned with developers and product managers to identify possible approaches.
1 month • (September - October 2024)
Technical feasibility assessment
Our proposal had to be aligned with various teams within HDB, from finance to legal and operations, to ensure that our proposal was operationally feasible and would benefit HDB and users collectively.
2 months • (October - December 2024)
User testing and refinement
Based on our proposal, designed and prototyped our idea, conducting 8 user testing sessions to validate and refine our designs further.
In summary, our design managed to achieve outcomes which are based off several metrics such as:
1. System usability scoring from users
Overall, our design was rated 78/100 based on 23 participants we tested. We gathered participants who had just completed their resale appointments to test the prototype — ensuring that the current experience of HDB's resale journey is fresh within their minds.
2. Number of steps and processes reduced in new experience
For sellers, we managed to reduce the number of payment transactions they would have to perform such as property tax payments, legal fees, S&CC payments to Town Councils and purchasing of fire insurance by pushing for these fees to be offset from their sales proceeds — creating a more integrated and streamlined process for buyers, rather than having to make these payments individually.
3. Cognitive load on users
In the new design, any legal or documents shared during the physical session can now be accessed before the final appointment through the applicant's HDB portal and timeline, affording users the time to read through and understand what they are signing before coming down for the final appointment.
4. Amount of paperwork/documents needed to be printed and filed
The final documents to be endorsed such as legal or financial documents will now be signed digitally via Singpass, and uploaded onto the applicant's HDB portal immediately, reducing the need for physical printing, scanning and filing of documents from the HDB officer. This reduces the tasks HDB officers would need to do in terms of post-appointment processing and storing of the files and documents signed.
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Consolidation of payment processes
Our team met with several payment related product teams to find a solution for consolidating payments related to Service & Conservancy Charges made to Town Councils.
This was one of the biggest pain points experienced by flat sellers. Other payment related tasks were also consolidated and handled in the backend by HDB's finance team after our team advocated for a better payment experience.
Provided visibility of ongoing processes
Our design caters for statuses to be displayed during any juncture where waiting is required for any party. This is to provide assurance and feedback for both the buyers and sellers that their case is being processed, and going according to plan — giving them an ease of mind.
Digital preparedness considerations
As resale appointments will be transitioning to a digital experience, it was crucial to ensure that our participants understand what is needed for the appointment. Ensuring that the users are prepared digitally was a key focus of our design to ensure a holistic experience.
Our team has also identified checkpoints at which users may face difficulties, thus services such as hotlines, checklists and video guides have been provided at those juncture to ensure that the user's needs are met.
The complexity and intensity of this project has given me profound appreciation for how systems work to interact with each other. Gathering accurate requirements tantamount to delivering a flow which balances operational functions with user experience — I believe that this skill can only be acquired working on large scale projects which involves factors of service design.
Personally, I believe the many physical requirement gathering sessions with stakeholders was immensely effective at not only building trust and rapport, but also understanding the needs of the organisation and the officers working on these systems.
This project was extremely fulfilling as I had a part to play in building Singapore's learning resource and to inspire a new generation of users who would look to the National Library as Singapore's knowledge resource.
During this project, I also had the opportunity to learn how a web interface can have such a strong impact in the perception and the positioning of an organisation. Little details and decisions made with stakeholders ended up shaping this project to be much greater than originally envisioned.
