The direction and design standards for the UI/UX of digital government services reflect overarching principles that prioritize innovation to ensure all users experience easy accessibility and convenience.
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User needs must drive all decision-making related to digital government services. This means understanding what users need, providing the information and functions they are looking for, and actively supporting them in achieving their intended goals.
The core purpose of any service is to help people accomplish something. Digital government services are no different—they must support users in completing a wide range of
government-related tasks. Designing services based on assumptions—without a real understanding of who the users are and what they want to accomplish—will inevitably result in
services that people do not use.
As more people achieve the outcomes they seek or resolve their issues through digital government services, government policy goals are better supported. Focusing on users—not
organizations or developers—at every stage of service design also helps align decision-making and reduce unnecessary communication and unproductive debate.
To provide user-centered digital government services, the following should be considered:
Define the Users of the Service
When defining users, it is not sufficient to rely solely on demographic characteristics. To understand users' diverse needs, they should be categorized based on service context—such as their goals, frequency of use, and task difficulty.
Consider the User Journey
By analyzing and addressing issues users encounter throughout the entire process—visiting, finding information, understanding content, performing tasks, and completing the service—it becomes possible to provide a seamless user experience.
Users of digital government services should be defined as all individuals with diverse abilities, environments, and circumstances—including persons with disabilities, older adults, children, and foreign nationals. Ensuring that everyone can achieve their goals with equal effort is at the core of an inclusive digital government service.
One reason inclusive digital services are often considered difficult to implement is the misconception that they are designed only for specific user groups. However, increasing
life expectancy, along with the growing diversity of society and technology, means that difficulties once experienced only by a small number of users can now affect
anyone—temporarily or situationally.
For instance, a person using a mobile device on a moving bus while holding a handrail experiences a situational limitation similar to someone who has only one functional arm.
Biological aging inevitably reduces sensory and cognitive abilities, meaning that everyone will eventually experience some form of long-term impairment.
This demonstrates that providing inclusive services ultimately improves convenience and usability for all users.
Identify and test at the earliest stage of digital government service design
Identify which user types may experience difficulties in specific situations, and make iterative improvements. It should be noted that attempting to resolve these issues at the final stage of development will inevitably require significantly more resources.
Address issues faced by the most challenged users first
When problems experienced by users with permanent disabilities are resolved, issues occurring in temporary or situational contexts are naturally addressed as well.
Provide alternatives suitable for each user group
The goal of this principle is not to require all users to follow the same method or procedure. Different users may have different approaches that are more accessible or convenient for them. Therefore, provide means that enable all user types to use the service with equal effort, while ensuring that the alternatives offered do not create a perception of unfairness or discrimination.
All digital government services should be implemented with consistent expression and design principles—regardless of institution or service type—so that users perceive them as part
of a unified Government of the Republic of Korea service environment.
Providing a common experience across digital government services does not imply enforcing an identical design. Because the roles and goals of institutions and services differ, the
information provided and the target users cannot be exact.
Successful digital government services must balance consistency with experiences optimized for each service's unique characteristics.
information or functions differs across institutions—or even within different parts of the same service—users may feel confusion or inconvenience, ultimately reducing their trust
in digital government services.
Providing a shared experience is also essential for practitioners who design and operate digital government services. When services are designed with consistency as a core goal,
resources needed for decision-making are reduced, enabling teams to focus more on tasks that meaningfully enhance user experience.
To ensure consistent experiences across all digital government services, the following should be considered:
Follow the digital government service design guidelines
The guidelines consist of reusable, repeatable elements. Designing based on these elements helps ensure consistency throughout the service. Their repeatability and reusability also make it easier to identify and address issues when improving specific screens within an existing service.
Provide optimal experiences by applying guidance suited to each service
Use the flexible rules outlined in the design guidelines to deliver the most appropriate digital government service experience for each user’s context, service characteristics, and project conditions.
Providing fast, simple digital government services means designing user experiences that minimize the number of decisions users need to make during the service journey.
Efforts to simplify service use into the most streamlined set of steps are often overlooked or omitted. This may occur when service flows are designed by simply following commonly used procedures without considering the specific nature of the service, or when there is insufficient understanding of user situations that require different flows under different conditions. Moreover, for essential tasks, users will typically complete the process as long as they do not encounter critical errors, regardless of how long it takes. As a result, it can be challenging to identify related issues through user feedback.
To help users achieve their goals more quickly and with less effort, the following should be considered:
Reducing the number of user decisions and actions required during the usage process
Break down the overall service journey into discrete steps and review each step carefully. When adding steps, consider whether they are truly necessary; when consolidating or removing steps, verify that the process flow is not adversely affected.
Considering the pace of each step
Tasks that require careful review and confirmation may naturally proceed more slowly and involve more stages. Focusing solely on minimizing steps, regardless of the task, can cause users to overlook essential decisions, leading to extra confirmation or repetition later.
Digital government services that are easy to understand and use are designed so that their content and user interface are familiar, concise, and intuitive—allowing users to complete tasks without assistance. Even when users make mistakes, the service provides timely and appropriate ways to return to a previous state, enabling them to resolve issues easily.
Interactions between users and digital government services occur in a non-face-to-face environment, which makes it even more important to ensure ease of use.
Various situations that arise when using digital government services can create uncertainty for users. To achieve their goals, users must continually interpret and understand
several aspects of the service that are unclear, including the interface and content.
When terminology, explanations, icons, images, or interaction patterns are unfamiliar or difficult to understand, users may experience confusion, make unconscious mistakes, or
misinterpret information—leading to errors. Reducing these errors by making interactions more intuitive, familiar, and predictable is crucial. Additionally, when users encounter
problems, the service should proactively offer support and guidance to help them identify and resolve errors quickly on their own.
To provide services that users can easily understand and use, the following should be considered:
To align user expectations with the actual service, the design should be based on established familiarity and should present information and functions naturally and logically.
When decisions are required, testing should be conducted to confirm whether even the inexperienced users can still achieve their intended goals, and reflect the results.
Feedback on situations where users may need assistance during service use should be collected and managed through a dedicated checklist.
Feedback on website errors should be prioritized and addressed promptly through efficient improvement processes.
Digital government services must account for the wide range of situations users may be in. This means recognizing that users differ in their goals, context, skill levels, and frequency of use—and ensuring that each person can use the service in the way that works best for them.
Users need the freedom to use services in ways that match their needs and circumstances.
For example, experienced users may want to move quickly through tasks or use advanced features to work more efficiently. In contrast, new users may need more guidance and clearer
steps to complete unfamiliar tasks. Some users prefer mobile environments, while others rely more heavily on PCs, and their devices or browsers may change depending on the
situation.
Understanding this diversity is essential. Services should provide users with the flexibility to choose how they complete tasks or adjust settings based on their preferences. They
should also be designed to deliver a seamless experience, even when users switch between devices.
To help users achieve their goals more quickly and with less effort, the following should be considered:
To understand different user goals and usage contexts, observe how users actually interact with the service across various environments.
Identify and define multiple ways for users to complete frequently performed tasks.
Advanced options can be provided to experienced users who want to work faster, while default flows stay clear and helpful for less experienced users—ensuring the service functions well for everyone.
Offer timely information and features based on the user’s activity history.
At the same time, ensure that this does not interrupt the user’s flow or reduce their sense of control.
Providing a trustworthy digital government service means ensuring that users clearly recognize at every moment—from the moment they arrive until they complete their tasks—that they are interacting with an official government service, and that the information they access is accurate and up to date.
Trust in a digital service is built gradually, through repeated experiences in which users achieve their goals without disappointment. However, a single dissatisfactory experience can undermine that trust, and rebuilding it often requires significantly more effort and resources. For this reason, maintaining reliability must be treated with particular care.
To earn and maintain user trust in government services, the following should be considered:
Place an official government banner across all services and screens, and provide appropriate logo placement in the header and footer.
If users are unsure whether a service is official, they may hesitate to use it.
Regularly and frequently review and update information for accuracy and freshness.
Inaccurate or outdated information can cause unexpected issues for users and quickly erode trust in the service. If updates are unavoidably delayed, it is advisable to inform users of the reason and communicate when the revised information will be available.