Client
New South Wales Department of Communities and Justice
Category
Public sector employee platform
Role
Lead designer
Contribution
User research
Workshop facilitation
Data analysis
Project management
IA restructure
User interface design
Value added
Optimised navigation to critical operational documentation
Improved news and operational content discovery
Launched refreshed visual design
Established long-term product roadmap
The NSW DCJ intranet is a critical tool used every day by 30,000 department employees across courts, housing, disability, child protection and corporate services. It is also the primary source of truth for news concerning political (MoG) and departmental restructures, operational updates, and internal/external events.
A lack of alignment in content governance and authorship, plus an aging tech stack, meant that employee trust in the intranet’s reliability was at an all-time low.
I was tasked with leading on the design of a new intranet with user experience enhancements in the most meaningful areas. These include key page redesigns, an information architecturerestructure, and new components for the quickly expanding NSW Government Design System (GDS).
The work commenced with a discovery phase in collaboration with representatives I connected with from each of the department's 8 divisions. They were able to assist by consulting key contacts in their teams and with recruitment for workshops and testing.
I facilitated eight workshops with the aim of creating a series of personas; semi-ficitional artifacts to help inform future design efforts.
Through an empathy mapping exercise, I sought to uncover certain traits from this diverse workforce:
It was surprising to understand the vast scale of the work DCJ undertakes, plus the very weak state of trust in the intranet as a viable tool to assist with daily tasks.
Through peer reviews of the empathy maps, there was plenty of material to build out personas.
A persona for each division was developed (8 in total), including demorgraphic information and typical intranet usage, frequency of use and general sentiment.
Frontline and client-facing duties were also included, both of which are key considerations for future intranet design.
The workshops were combined with other user research activities. These provided detailed quantitative statics backed by qualitative insights. The result was a prioritised series of proposed actions, presented to the executive director and accepted.
HR staff reports
Demographic data on 24,000+ employees
Digital survey
14 questions, 220+ responses
Google Analytics analysis
From 11 million pageviews in 2023-24
Utilising and expanding on the DCJ Digital Design System, this project’s first deliverable was a refresh of the intranet home page. This is in response to qualitative data revealing a desire to see ‘need to know’ information as quickly as possible in the user journey.
Before my introduction to the project, the intranet CMS provider was SquizMatrix. DCJ could only use a limited library and the visual styling had long felt disjointed and outdated.
Quick links and topical department news 'In the spotlight' now sit above the fold—the space employees see when they log in every day. These top links were identified through GA analysis and interviews.
A recent migration to Adobe Experience Manager CMS allowed me to access a wider library of components. A dynamically-fed table component was used for our 'News and notices' section. Before this, an employee had to make two clicks away from the home page to access DCJ news.
NSW teal and yellow colours sit atop a primarily white canvas
Adobe Experience Manager allowed us to use NSW's font, Public Sans
Utilising a new, expanding library of photographic assets
Bespoke iconography created to symbolise news and event themes
DCJ has 30,000+ employees. Up to 27,000 working days and $7.5m a year may be wasted by an organisation of this size, if an average of 5 mins every day is spent stuck on a site finding the correct content.
Closely following search functionality, a robust information architecture (IA) is crucial to claiming back this lost value. With no single point of content ownership since it's inception, a restructure was sorely needed.
Based on my research, I crafted a new IA which covered the entire intranet. It covered all pages that sit up to 3 levels below the home page—no mean feat for an intranet of thousands of pages.
I renamed high-level pages to be clearer, more easily searchable, or to reduce high character count (as card components allow a maximum of 60 characters).
For example, ‘mySafety’ became 'Workplace safety’ to be clearer for new emoloyees and those who may simply be confused by the naming, which could signify to them a program that doesn't include them.
I consolidated scattered but related pages under a single parent, moved child pages across parents that made more sense and archived redundant pages.
Some parent pages moved higher or lower in hierarchy. For example, ‘Health and wellbeing’ now became a L1 page to reinforce DCJs movement towards promoting employee health and wellbeing.
To ascertain that the changes would have a positive effect once implemented, I ran a tree test and sent an open invite to staff.
When prompted to find pages covering the subject of X/Y/Z, the success rate doubled from 35% in our last study 3 years prior, to 70%. Directness rate improved, so fewer clicks were recorded. The time taken to reach the intended pages was reduced by 3 seconds.
35%
Increase in employees successfully finding the intranet pages they need
1 million +
Pageviews per month, on average
A$7.5 million
Estimated savings due to navigation time saved
"
Thank you Philip for leading a comprehensive user experience engagement campaign. Your vision, empathy and dedication to inclusion is making an enormous impact for driving employee centric digital products at DCJ.
"
– Jessica Meyers, Director, Digital Experience at DCJ
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