Background

Code for Australia’s mission is to drive digital transformation into the Australian government to create a positive impact on society by connecting government innovators, corporate leaders, and creative technologists through their 3 programs: Fellowship, Academy and Civic Lab. The Code for Australia website is a single portal which serves a wide range of stakeholders including developers and designers, government, corporates and citizens.

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overview

The team at Code for Australia sought to improve the clarity of communications and better drive conversion behaviour on their homepage. 

First step was an initial business analysis to better understand their unique business model. This was followed by an heuristic analysis which was conducted to discover any usability issues and form a hypothesis around why users were not signing up.

User interviews by phone or in person contributed to research around personas and user journeys. Ultimately problem statements for each user type revealed some core issues with the site.

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Understanding how Code for Australia works

It was a standout clue that further analysis of the business needed to be done after scrutinising the website from top to bottom. A lean canvas as well as a decision matrix was done collaboratively with the client. This lead to the hypothesis that calls to action were unclear and the pathway to proceed had been muddled by information on the different programs sounding similar and being poorly communicated.

Rewarding user interviews

Many in-depth user interviews were conducted either in person, over the phone or via survey. These yielded rich results which were turned into key insights and opened up ideas for future opportunities too. For example some key insights included the fact that government decision makers do not use the site; that corporates have a specific list of details that they need to see on the site in order to follow through with a sign up; and that a timeline of the fellowship year’s activities would very much encourage creative technologists to become part of the program. 

Off the back of these interviews, personas were developed to help create the problem statements that would form the backbone of the proposed solution.

Conducting usability testing with some of the interviewees helped consolidate some of the problems with the user journeys which informed some UI recommendations made to the client.

Ideation fun

The client delighted in collaborating where possible and very much enjoyed all ideation sessions. These were run as design studios to rapidly generate ideas, iterations and solutions to the problem statements we had developed. We did weekly standups with the client, along with some of the Fellows who were engaged in government programs at the time.. 

Quick insights through low fidelity prototypes

Due to the quick turn around time for the project, some low-fi wireframes were created to get some instant user feedback on some of the solutions posited. Among some of the user feedback was the insight that the terms “Fellowship”, “Civic lab” and “Academy” were incomprehensible to users new to Code for Australia. This was solved by adding some simple copy to explain the programs in a few words where appropriate. Testing also revealed UI issues like the fact that users found the pages were too long to scroll through so a few other layout options like tabs were suggested and additional user testing will validate whether this was sufficient.

Next steps

With the project length being short, there were limitations to the number of iterations of prototypes that could be tested. It was suggested that higher fidelity wireframes be developed and tested next. Due to the user feedback about scrolling and language issues, a copywriting style guide and content strategy should be planned too. A service design blueprint was highly recommended to better support and retain Fellows throughout their journey and beyond. This will likely also provide valuable insights into the Fellowship experience and how to leverage this information in order to retain Fellows and attract new ones.

Brilliant feedback

At the end of the project, there was some high praise from client about the insights presented and an offer for ongoing work in the future.