Community Facing Digital Platform & Presence for Local Government
Complete redesign and rebuild of a Local Government community facing digital platform and presence. The resulting product transformed the user’s experience by delivering a more engaging and easier to use digital platform for the local community, while pivoting internal stakeholders away from old operational benchmarks and towards a commitment to greater customer focus and improved community engagement and digital governance.
Responsibilities
Product Design
Interaction & User Interface Design
System & Information Architecture
Front-End Development
Understanding the Need & Defining the Problem
Through user research employing a range of qualitative and quantitative methods, a list of high level challenges were identified. Empathy mapping was used to better understand user motivations, while developing well defined User Personas provided a blueprint for who the target audience was.
The overall feedback from users was that the experience of interacting with the organisation digitally was difficult and confusing, that information could not be trusted, and that services were hard to find and understand. Out of this research a greater understanding of the need of the user, and the problem with the existing product, was defined.
The result of this process was a list of key product goals to be used both as a way to define and map design development tasks, and as a way to answer design questions as they arose during the course of development.
Key Product Goals
-
Focus on key activities and services
-
Prioritise what matters to users, based on data
-
Provide simple, clear and actionable information about the services and operations of Council
-
Promote two-way communication that empower the community
-
Deliver a modern, inviting and accessible experience
-
Continuously test user experience and iterate as we learn about our Community needs to ensure true Responsive Design
User Flow - Providing Multiple Pathways to Content
Different users want/need to interact with, and discover, content in different ways. Using the User Personas developed during the discovery phase of the design process as a blueprint, multiple ‘content discovery’ pathway options were built into the information architecture (IA) and product build. A requirement was introduced that ensured that every piece of actionable content had a minimum of five pathway options attached. This method provided a baked-in method to help ensure content never became buried or misplaced, a key issue with previous solutions.
User Experience & Design Language
Through various fidelity levels of prototyping and testing, I built a design language that was translated into a component library that formed the foundational user experience. All levels of community facing digital interactions were updated to meet this design language, delivering interaction consistency across all services.
Delivered Experience
