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Hack for Public Good
Tooling & Productivity

Lens

10 February 2025

Get actionable citizen insights fast

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Problem

Government product teams regularly collect citizen feedback through generic in-product surveys ("Rate your experience with this website"). While the initiative to collect citizen feedback is commendable, teams often end up with large amounts of superficial data without understanding the "why" behind responses.

Teams who recognise this limitation face a difficult choice: either continue with inadequate feedback or invest significant resources in building custom survey solutions from scratch.

Another widespread challenge: access and analysis of feedback is inconsistent across teams, bottlenecked by the availability and expertise of just one or two individuals—typically the designer or product manager.

The Result: Without actionable citizen insights, products remain unpolished as teams prioritise new features over eliminating existing friction points.

Solution

Our Vision: Speed up the journey from citizen insights to better products, turning months into days.

To achieve this, we're building towards an AI research assistant for every product team, one that works round-the-clock with the capabilities of an experienced Lead Researcher.

We're starting with the fundamentals. Here's what we've launched:

We've made it easy to launch a good in-product survey

Setup a survey in three simple steps:

  1. Select from a curated list of surveys crafted by research experts

  2. Customise the content to match your context and brand guidelines

  3. Implement the generated code snippet into your application

Screenshot of new survey page
We've made it easy to access the responses

Ensure seamless and intuitive access to feedback data across your entire team.

  1. Authenticate securely with your gov.sg email address

  2. Access real-time feedback data through an intuitive interface

  3. View automated quarterly trend analyses and filtered insights without technical expertise

Screenshot of feedback page

Try Lens today at https://lens.hack2025.com.sg/

What's Next

Onboard more teams

Fully onboard the teams that have expressed interest in using Lens.

  1. Postman

  2. ActiveSG

  3. Letters

  4. Armoury

  5. AskGov

  6. Pair

  7. ReturnLah (onboarded)

  8. Do Good (onboarded)

  9. Answer

  10. Dabble

  11. Turn Down the Heat

  12. Polidex

Priortise blockers

There are a few known core features that are still missing which is preventing teams for fully onboarding:

  1. Trigger settings: Prevent survey fatigue by allowing admins to set % of users and frequency of when users will be prompted with a survey

  2. Manage collaborators: Manage access to responses

We should also have a steady steam of responses coming in. We will validate whether the responses are of higher quality and iterate on it. If all is good, we can move on to the next stage of automatically generating actionable insights based on the responses.

Start work on agentic analysis

After a few iterations, we should more or less have a solid flow of good and structured data coming in. By this time, Agentic AI will be more mainstream so we can start exploring the best approach to work towards our future of having an AI research assistant for every product team, one that works round-the-clock with the capabilities of an experienced Lead Researcher.

Further Reading

Opportunity

Many products built in government today are just functional in quality. If we empower teams with timely, actionable insights, we can elevate our products to be potentially world-class. Lens should be used by every product team in government.

Great products means citizens get what they need easier and faster.

Velocity

During the hackathon period, we've launched a working product. As of demo day 10th Feb 2025, Lens can:

  1. Create a survey by selecting from a curated list of surveys crafted by research experts

  2. Customise the survey by adding context to the question and brand colour

  3. Prevent misuse of survey by validating token with domain url

  4. Launch survey by installing a package and pasting a generated code snippet

  5. A survey widget with logic will appear and can be submitted

  6. Responses will appear instantly on admin feedback page

  7. Responses can be filtered by time and type (negative, neutral, positive)

Traction

Many teams resonated with the effort it takes to setup a new survey and regularly analysing responses. Here are the teams that have committed interest (pending availability and some missing features).

  1. Postman

  2. ActiveSG

  3. Letters

  4. Armoury

  5. AskGov

  6. Pair

  7. ReturnLah (onboarded)

  8. Do Good (onboarded)

  9. Answer

  10. Dabble

  11. Turn Down the Heat

  12. Polidex

We also had more than 40 individuals who signed our interest form during demo day. They were from the following organisations:

  1. CSIT

  2. MINDEF

  3. DGC KH

  4. SingHealth

  5. Care Corner

  6. MOM

  7. NYC

  8. GovTech

  9. MDDI

  10. ACRA

  11. MOE

  12. MAS

  13. NUHS

  14. DOTC

  15. SGH

  16. PA

Team

Alex, Alexis, Brian, Darren, Dunn, Zong Xian, Zul

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