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Year
2019
Responsibilities
  • Interaction Design
  • Visual Design
  • Research

Designing a grants portal for the Government of Singapore

The Ministry of Culture, Communication and Youth (MCCY) grants portal - now known as the SG Grants Portal - brings together government grants for the arts, community, heritage, social good, sports and youth into one place.

The goal of the online portal is to streamline the grant application process and make it a lot easier for Singaporeans to apply for government grants and for government agencies to administer these grants to its citizens.
This project was built as a part of the Singapore Digital initiative.

cute illustrations

My role

As a Product Designer on the project, I worked alongside a Lead Designer and a Content Designer to design the MVP of the grants portal.

I also worked with a UX Researcher to conduct contextual enquiry studies to understand how government officers disburse grants, with the Lead Designer and Product Manager to establish product principles and design guidelines for the product and with a Visual Designer to refine the visual identity.

The end goal

I was brought on to this project after the core problem statement and success metrics had been defined.

Our goal was to create a one-stop grants portal for the community so that the citizens of Singapore have a stress-free application process and get quick access to funding.

MCCY main page

Learning by observing

A significant part of this project was working closely with the core government agencies to understand how government officials receive applications, review them and issue grants to applicants.

To do this I worked with our researcher to conduct interviews and contextual inquiry studies over two weeks.

pain point board

Mapping out insights from contextual inquiry.

Consolidating insights

After conducting interviews, contextual inquiry and analyzing the data I was able to categorize the insights into three main categories - Communication, Workflow management and Security.

Understanding the workflow

Before exploring design concepts, I mapped out the grant submission and approval workflows to make sure our online portal reflected a workflow that applicants and officials were familiar with.

workflow chart

Introducing the grants portal

After proposing multiple concepts and going through multiple rounds of user testing, we had the final version of the grants portal.

Illustrations

I also worked on some of the illustrations for the portal alsong with the Visual designer.

workflow chart

Launch and impact

The MCCY Grants Portal has now been rebranded as the OurSG Grants Portal. As of today the portal consolidates grants and is being used by 12 different government agencies in Singapore and offers over 60 different grants. Hundreds-of-thousands of Singaporeans have been able to apply for and obtain grants through the portal.

I was super fortunate to be a part of such an impactful project for the Government of Singapore. You can learn more about the portal here.

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