Project Overview

The Work Pass Integrated System handles permit applications and renewals for foreign domestic workers in Singapore — a high-volume public service used by employers and placement agents, running on systems that predated the web as most people had come to use it.

The constraint

Government service design carries obligations a commercial product does not. The system had to meet statutory process, remain accessible to users with low digital confidence and limited English, and satisfy public-sector accessibility standards — while being rebuilt in an agile model that the client organisation had never used before. The delivery method was as unproven, internally, as the design.

My role

I joined in 2013 as design lead for Neo Singapore, and stayed through to deployment. I ran the research and discovery phase, set the UX strategy, and led interface design, working directly with the Ministry's internal staff and the engineering team.

Approach

• Started from how employers and agents actually complete permit work — not from the structure of the existing forms, which had been designed around internal processing rather than the applicant.
• Restructured the application and renewal journeys around those real tasks.
• Ran story mapping and prioritisation with the Ministry so scope decisions were made against user need rather than legacy feature parity.
• Held the build to government web accessibility standards throughout, rather than auditing at the end.

Outcome

The system went live and became the reference case for agile delivery inside the Singapore Government — the first project of its kind there. It received the GovInsider Innovation Award in 2016 for excellence in public service design.

Research artefacts

Fifteen artefacts from the discovery and research phase — field research with employers and agents, journey mapping, and the workshop material used to align the Ministry on scope.