The Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) – IVY (I Visit you) DTL (Digital Tenancy Lease) tablet app
launched in 2017, is the first and only digital leasing process for community housing tenants by redefining
the steps that enable Australia’s most vulnerable people to find a home.

Duration of project: 4 weeks

Identifying opportunities 

With a few weeks remaining in an enhancement engagement, there was an opportunity to evaluate
the app since its release in 2017. So, we proposed and conducted a Design Audit of the app in order to
recommend key areas of improvements that will further improve usability. We evaluated the current
experience 
against Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics (rules) for User Experience 
& Interface Design
and included these 4 rating priorities which are marked against the issues picked up during evaluation.

Crunch time

Because the IVY app is an app full of forms and overlapping tenant types,
I had to divide the flows into 3 sections that covers:

– Global screens for all users

– Forms for pre sign up users

– Forms for post sign up users

I provided detailed observations and recommendations for each screen and
a chart to show which heuristic impacts which screens the most, and how
they are rated against the rating priorities.

Summarisation and action plan

Next, I summarised the observations and recommendations for each section and came up with an action plan.

Quick wins

It provides medium impact with low design effort. We managed to bring it into sprint in the remaining time
of the engagement and fix accessibility issues, unclear use case of global notification banners and clunky
keyboard interaction causing frustration to the users.

Short term plan 

Provides high impact with medium design effort which requires design thinking and tech review and can
be developed at a later stage.

Medium term plan

Provides high impact with high design effort which requires discovery and ideation in collaboration with
the team and DCJ.

Continuous improvement plan

Consists of activities recommended as best practice that is regular design check up alongside tech,
conduct regular user testing and revitalising data shown in the app to keep up with design trends.