Office of the Public Advocate sites
Parisfirst worked with the Office of the Public Advocate to redevelop its public website, intranet (OPAnet) and volunteers’ portal. The objective of the project was to refresh the sites and employ user-centric principles so that users could successfully find the information they were looking for. The project included rewriting the website content.
User research
Engagement activities aimed to determine how the website, OPAnet and the Volunteer Hub were used, satisfaction levels of users, and user expectations and ideas for improvements. Activities included:
- Online survey of website users
- Focus groups with members of the general public
- One-on one Interviews with key user groups and organisations
- Online surveys of staff and volunteers
- Group interviews with executive staff and senior management to identify the organisation’s vision for the three sites
- One-on one interviews with key staff to identify opportunities and barriers
- Workshops and focus groups with staff and volunteers to understand how staff and volunteers use and want to use the intranets
- Usage statistics to provide insight into user behaviors on the three sites and what content users were accessing and downloading (and how often).
Information architecture
The findings from research and consultations informed the new topic structure for the sites, and the features and functionality of the homepages and lower level pages.
The overall aim for each site was to develop a simpler, task-based navigation and to improve the discovery of content by increasing visibility to the most-used content.
User testing
An information architecture validation survey (using Treejack) was conducted to test the proposed structure for each site and identify opportunities for improvement.
The current content was then remapped using the new structure.
Visual design
Responsive wireframes for the homepages, level 1, level 2 and content pages were created. Functionality was defined for whole of sites, homepage, landing pages, as well as functional components.
Content
Content was rewritten to:
- Simplify complex concepts
- Increase instructional and task based content
- Bring consistency in structure and style across the sites
- Be audience specific where appropriate
- Prioritise critical content and reduce or eliminate unnecessary information.
The redeveloped public website, OPAnet and Volunteer Hub ensured the following goals were achieved:
- Improved access to key content that was audience specific
- A more logical topic structure with terminology that resonated with users
- Consistent and effective navigation down to 3 levels
- Contextual access to other related information elsewhere on the site
- Contemporary and responsive visual design that created an engaging experience.
© 2017