IMDA design assessment
I designed MyBusiness Plan as a goal-led orchestration layer for GoBusiness—helping a first-time owner understand the next safe action, the dependency behind it and the agency that remains responsible.
A concise project brief that makes my individual contribution, collaborators and definition of success clear before the detailed process.
A first-time F&B owner may cross entity registration, digital authorisation, premises approval, licensing, inspection, tax and employment services before opening. Each transaction can work independently while the owner still carries the hidden work of sequencing tasks, transferring context and recovering from exceptions.
This is not a search problem. It is a confidence problem: am I doing the right thing, in the right order, with the right evidence?
I connected behavioural, operational and qualitative evidence before choosing a solution. Each signal created a concrete design implication.
A previous Government redesign documented 14 touchpoints, reduced a form from 845 to 90 fields and saved 10–14 days for setting up an eatery.
Cross-agency friction has been material and addressable, but those results justify discovery rather than predict this concept's impact.
The Food Shop Licence journey is documented across 12 steps and includes rejection, resubmission and response deadlines.
The experience must clarify dependencies and recovery—not only make the happy path easier to browse.
GoBusiness already brings together more than 120 Government e-services and has supported more than six million transactions.
The credible product direction is an orchestration layer on the existing platform, not another destination that fragments the ecosystem.
The blueprint keeps the customer journey, visible product behaviour and operational responsibilities connected across the same sequence.
Answers a short set of questions about the business type, premises and target opening date.
A relevant six-stage plan explains the next safe action and estimated effort.
A rules layer assembles the path while agency-owned guidance remains the source of truth.
Registers the entity and decides who can act for the business.
Entity and access tasks show ownership, completion and downstream dependencies.
ACRA and CorpPass transactions remain authoritative; the plan records progress and hand-offs.
Confirms permitted use before committing to fit-out or licensing work.
The plan explains why the premises check comes first and links to the responsible service.
URA or HDB guidance, rule provenance and last-updated details support the recommendation.
Collects documents, submits the licence application and responds to requests.
Tasks expose evidence, blockers, deadlines and what will unlock the next stage.
GoBusiness and SFA own submission and decisions while a status adapter normalises progress language.
Moves into tax, employment and recurring obligations—or resolves an exception.
One progress view shows owner, due date, next move and a clear assisted path.
Exception routing preserves case context and returns policy-specific decisions to the responsible agency.
Scroll horizontally on smaller screens to follow the complete service.
Open the original interactive MyBusiness Plan proposalThe artefacts were useful because they helped the team make choices. This is the evidence-to-decision trail behind the final experience.
GoBusiness already has broad service coverage and transaction scale. A new destination would add another place for owners to understand and trust.
Design MyBusiness Plan as a goal-led orchestration layer within GoBusiness, with agency transactions always one step away.
The core uncertainty is not whether tasks exist; it is what can be done safely now, what must wait and why.
Make the next safe action dominant while keeping the full plan, dependencies, ownership and status available for context.
Shared status and data reuse create value, but also introduce privacy, accuracy, taxonomy and multi-agency delivery risk.
Start with a read-only plan and deep links, then earn integration through prototype evidence and a bounded F&B pilot.
I treated the operating experience and the interface as one system. Each lens solved a different part of the same problem.
Shaping the ecosystem, hand-offs and operating model.
Turning service decisions into clear, usable product behaviour.
I moved the problem from page-level simplification to the sequence across entity, access, premises, licensing and operating obligations—the coordination work a small business currently performs itself.
I used public GovTech, SFA, URA and EnterpriseSG sources to establish scale and known friction, then labelled sequence failures and confidence gains as hypotheses requiring discovery.
I ranked the next safe action first, shared progress second, safe delegation third and data reuse fourth because wrong sequencing creates cost sooner than duplicate data entry.
The journey follows a bakery owner from plan to operation. The service blueprint connects owner-visible behaviour with rules, status adapters, exception routing and agency decision ownership.
Desktop and mobile concepts answer three questions at a glance: what should I do next, why now and who owns it? Provenance, recency and recovery sit beside the moment of doubt.
I proposed baseline research, a read-only prototype, a four-week shared-status pilot and only then consented data reuse—with explicit comprehension, rework, accuracy and privacy gates.
These constraints shaped the solution, the order of work and the compromises I made with the wider team.
Public evidence supported the opportunity, but an assessment timeline did not provide primary research or proof of this specific solution.
I labelled every assumption, avoided claiming shipped impact and designed the first delivery phase to baseline failure demand with owners and service officers.
A unified experience could accidentally hide policy nuance or imply that GoBusiness owns decisions made by individual agencies.
I standardised task and status language while keeping rule ownership, provenance, source dates and authoritative transactions visible.
A useful plan needs context, but data reuse and delegation can expose more information or authority than the task requires.
I limited questions to what changes the path and made future prefill consent-specific, reviewable and reversible, with narrow task-level delegation.
The first three figures describe an earlier GoBusiness redesign; they demonstrate that the problem has been material and addressable, not that this concept would repeat the result. The remaining figures describe the current service ecosystem. No project outcome is claimed.
Open the original interactive MyBusiness Plan proposalDefined a goal-led GoBusiness extension rather than adding another portal to the ecosystem.
Turned a fragmented agency sequence into a six-stage plan from business idea to ongoing operation.
Connected interface behaviour to rules, status normalisation, exception routing and agency decision rights.
Produced a staged pilot strategy with comprehension, rework, accuracy, accessibility and privacy guardrails.
My strongest contribution was treating cross-agency UX as an operating-model problem, then making it tangible through one testable product concept, a service blueprint and staged evidence gates.
In Government services, simplicity is only trustworthy when provenance, decision ownership and exception handling remain visible.
I would interview 12–15 recent F&B founders, shadow five setup journeys and analyse support themes before testing whether at least 80% can identify the correct next action without critical comprehension errors.