Criterion 2. Motivate digital use

Criterion 2 – Motivate digital use

Motivation acts as a driving force for users to overcome digital barriers, such as a lack of skills and confidence. When users engage digitally, make sure their experience is as easy and enjoyable as possible to keep them engaged.

Your responsibilities

To successfully meet this criterion, agencies need to:

communicate the benefits of adopting a digital channel
understand the motivations of your audience
make the digital service easy to use.

When to apply

Apply Criterion 2 throughout Discovery as you gather research and insights on your target audience. Revisit this criterion:

once you go Live and assess uptake of your service
across the Service design and delivery process to remain relevant as users wants and needs evolve.

Questions for consideration

What needs or goals motivate users to engage digitally?
Have we gathered feedback or analytics to understand user needs?
How might we customise the user experience to resonate with diverse user needs?
Have we addressed digital barriers causing users to seek alternate service delivery channels?
Have you considered how others have overcome similar issues across government?

How to apply criterion 2

Demonstrate why going digital is worthwhile: Provide clear and comprehensive information about the purpose and benefits of digital services. Where possible, highlight time savings, convenience and emphasise how these enhance the overall user experience.
Use inclusive language and imagery: Use inclusive language and imagery, avoiding stereotypes and biases when communicating with your audience. Consider diverse cultural perspectives and make sure content is simple, respectful, and welcoming for all.
Understand motivational drivers: Use research and insights to understand the motivations of users and encourage them to remain engaged. This will help you understand if a service is too complicated or lacks support. To determine your current baseline of engagement, assess what proportion of your target audience engages online and work towards practices that encourage greater inclusion.
Demonstrate ease of use: Consider demonstrating the service to new users. If possible, allow them to interact with the service and experience it firsthand. Prioritise interfaces that prioritise content that’s easy to find and make interactions as straightforward as possible.
Provide supporting guides and materials: Craft user guides with step-by-step instructions and include visual aids to support deeper levels of understanding. Provide a tiered structure in your support documentation, such as basic content for beginners and advanced topics for more experienced users. Determine where a self-service approach, such as online forums, can help users through their challenges.
Address barriers and concerns: Address challenges and make sure services are accessible so they allow for independence, empowerment and dignified access. Remove barriers that may force users to look to others for help. This is particularly important for services that detail financial or health-related information that users may prefer to keep private.
Provide gradual transition options: Encourage users to take their first digital step by lowering the barriers to getting started. For instance, promote awareness of the service through a variety of channels and offer hybrid service options, where available, that allow users to start a process offline and complete it online, easing them into the digital option.
Ask for information only once: Review internal and external data collection methods, and where possible, support users to provide information only once. Minimising duplication helps reduce frustrations for users.

Guidance to motivate digital use

Services should be easy to use and enable users to achieve their intended tasks efficiently. Encourage users to engage digitally by understanding their motivations and communicating the benefits of digital adoption:
- Conduct user research to understand why the service is used by the target audience. This can include interviews, surveys, observations and analytics on user needs, goals, expectations and behaviours.
- Gather information from past research reports, journey maps or project summaries. This can include historical internal documentation, internal databases, project archives or management systems.
- Develop user personas, empathy maps or user journey maps.
Determine how users interact with the service:
- Consider principles of Digital Inclusion. The Agency for Digital Government provides a good starting point for information on Digital Inclusion and considerations or government services.
- Barriers are often the cause of digital use reluctance. Find barriers by conducting user research, collecting feedback from users and testing the service with new and diverse users.
Document your findings and recommendations on how to apply criterion 2
- Make sure your proposal includes evidence showing consideration of user needs and provisions for easy service delivery to motivate digital use.
- Use the Digital Capability Assessment Process (DCAP) template to report on meeting the criterion.
- Make sure the data is collected and documented in a centralised knowledge repository.

Digital Inclusion Standard

Criterion 2 – Motivate digital use

Your responsibilities

When to apply

Questions for consideration

How to apply criterion 2

Guidance to motivate digital use

Criterion 3 – Protect users

Connect with the digital community