Content & UX for a complex government website

CLIENT

Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission

SERVICES

Content governance, accessible content, content redevelopment, project management, user experience.

Simon was hired by Icon Agency to work on this project and deliver the above services.

As Australia’s national regulator of aged care services, the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission (ACQSC) serves three audiences: people receiving aged care, aged care providers and aged care workers.

However, as the Commission’s role grew, the volume of website content increased. The old ACQSC website housed many pages and resources with no strategic approach to site structure. Eventually, the website became hard to use since content for specific audiences was hard to locate.

ROLE

Icon Agency were contracted to redevelop the ACQSC website. Simon, working for Icon, played an integral role in the project. As the project’s content manager, Simon led the content and UX streams. He analysed site data, held user workshops, designed user testing (moderated and unmoderated), and conducted stakeholder interviews to understand user perceptions of the site’s tone, navigation and accessibility. He then performed a content audit of around 300 pages. He assessed content against user research and data analysis, and tagged pages for archiving, deletion, merging and rewriting.

Based on the results, Simon designed a new, concise information architecture that prioritised clear wayfinding and optimal user journeys.

Simon managed a team of writers, rewriting content based on the audit and style guide he developed. Simon also managed content loading into the Drupal CMS and designed a web governance framework with guidelines, checkpoints and processes for uploading, reviewing, archiving and deleting content.

RESULTS

Accessibility

Simon’s team achieved an average Year 7 grade level (down from the original average of Grade 12), demystifying complex language that had been a barrier to usability and delivering accessible content for diverse audiences (including senior users with diverse cognitive abilities).

The page count was also reduced from 300 to 200, a significant reduction in duplicated, redundant and outdated resources and information.

Recognition & analytics

The new site won two Web Excellence Awards in the Health Care and Accessibility categories, while recent Google Analytics data showed that users now spend less time searching for critical information, reducing unnecessary site visits by up to 90%.