Problem

Government websites are for the general public, yet they're notorious for presenting complex information, walls of text, and jargon. These issues tend to affect a person's ability to engage with the content, and as a result, most visitors will leave out of frustration, confusion, and disinterest.

Contributing to this problem is the perception of an unhelpful search tool; most government websites feature a search box, and unfortunately, an overly zealous search results page too. Intended as a fix for finding and navigating content quickly, it instead overwhelms users with too much information at once.

The New Zealand Customs Service website was a prime example of these issues. Built with web technologies of the late 2000s, it didn't allow for easy content management or navigation. After only a few years, usage analysis and statistics showed that the UI and UX fell below acceptable and sustainable standards.

Approach

UX research shows that people have short attention spans and tend to abandon a search if they perceive difficulty. My overall goal was to reduce this across the website's navigation, content, searching functionality, and structure. To achieve this, I targeted the issues using a top-down and bottom-up approach.

Top-down: I wanted to make sure that information would be easy to find; this meant designing and developing an IA that met the users mental model of the website.

Bottom-up: I wanted to make sure that the content was easy to find and consume; this meant that each web page would have to be concise, clear and focused. A writing style that matched all ages and language levels would have to be adopted, too.

Bringing these approaches together, I also had to consider where and how users traverse a website; cross-site links and metadata would have to be carefully designed and tested.

Process

The first task was to audit all the existing content available online. I liaised with the relevant departments to determine the content to be kept or removed from the website.

All the content that Customs chose to keep influenced the initial IA that was proposed and built. The idea was to separate content as it applied to individuals, businesses, or corporates.

We had to review all of the written content and related media (e.g. images, videos, documents). I assisted with rewriting and redesigning the content for the website. We used a visual and writing style guide to ensure we achieved a consistent voice and appearance. All the rewriting and editing was done by collaborating with SMEs.

In preparation for uploading to the CMS, I annotated all the content as clearly as possible for content migrators. I marked out the typographic hierarchies for the written content, preselected the SEO tags and descriptions, and provided links to related topics.

As content was loaded, I tracked and tested the navigation, search functionality, and IA.

Outcome

After the launch, analytics and qualitative data showed that the website offered an improved experience for visitors. There were more in-site clicks and destinations, which showed that users were engaged and navigating the content, instead of leaving after a single page view.

The new search results page also had a positive impact on visitors. Analytics showed that users spent less time looking at the search results and efficiently moved to other web pages; compared to before, visitors were saving time looking for information.