Usability and the art of gentle persuasion at Justice

The web portfolio for Victoria’s Department of Justice is a complex array of more than 60 sites, reflecting the diverse nature of the department’s services and structure. The Department provides services to register a birth; work with children; get married; register a business; licence a firearm; pay fines; adopt a retired greyhound and register a death – to name but a few. From a user perspective this experience can be confusing and inconsistent.

The remit for the project was not for the faint hearted: to fix messy architecture and outdated content across the department’s “core” website; improve confusing and difficult navigation; and build a better user experience for over 90,000 monthly visitors.

This transformation had to provide users with fast and easy access to content and functions, support outward messaging, and communicate the brand values of the department.
Rather than describing the whole process, this presentation will talk through some of the challenges, false starts and mistakes. For example:

  • What exactly do you do with a carefully-designed information architecture, when most of the users in the ‘final’ evaluation just don’t get it?
  • How about a thoroughly researched audience definition, where most of the user groups find the proposed content on the site irrelevant?
  • Or what about a set of designs including wireframes and business process diagrams, that simply do not engage stakeholders?

These ‘hard bits’ provided the opportunity to stand back and ‘have another go’. Sometimes we tried a different approach and occasionally, the same approach applied differently. The presentation will be given from both the UX and program management perspectives. We’ll show how we fitted UX in with other aspects of complex projects, such as stakeholder engagement and content management.

Presentation audio

Presentation

Sketchnotes

Usability and the art of gentle persuasion at Justice - John Murphy and Gavin Hince

Photos

Gavin Hince
John Murphy
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