Background

The City of Sydney is responsible for almost everything that makes it one of the greatest and most unique cities in the world. Libraries, parks, waste and urban development to name a few. They have a plethora of services and content to maintain. But the reality is, dealing with the government and trying to navigate their systems can often feel like being stuck in a labyrinth of information with little clarity. We were tasked with not only creating a beautifully designed website that embodies Sydney’s spirit and culture, but also communicates the City's policies and strategies that are central to their vision. It had to be brutally simple – so simple that your Nana could quickly and easily find out how to report graffiti. Built using Sitecore, the project set out to drastically improve visibility and understanding of the City of Sydney’s services, strategies and initiatives.

Describe the strategy

The process began by mapping facets that make up a council and its services, and identifying connections. This map evolved into a beautifully simplified content model with meaningful structure that made sense. Patterns were uncovered in abstract concepts like planning strategies, history and development, generating content types with reusable, consistent attributes. The new structure didn’t just evolve from the underlying domain – we also interviewed and observed residents and businesses on how they look for and articulate their council-related needs. This further informed our decisions and resulted in a radical departure from how the City historically approached information finding. By taking time to design structure before detail, when it came to representing it all through a new look and feel, there was great insight to draw from. This meant UI wasn't just designing pages and components, but what content they represent, why someone’s reading it, and what they’re looking for.

Describe the execution

The website was meticulously designed around the plethora of content and its users’ needs top of mind. We created a responsive design language that translates the City of Sydney brand into a scalable, digital setting, utilising best practice design patterns and creative solutions. The website build uses React and server-side rendering to give it the feel of a single-page app, all without compromising search engine optimisation. Clever caching and lazy loading ensure a speedy time-to-first-interaction. The website is also built for accessibility, with screen-reader-only elements giving additional context for vision-impaired users. You can also navigate the whole site with your keyboard, with careful tab-ordering and focus states implemented throughout.

List the results

Results have been outstanding, and we believe we’ve set the new standard for how a government site should look and operate. Staff can update the website quickly and easily. Content can also often be found on Google as Featured Snippets, drastically cutting search time. Success measures focused on content findability. They were 1) number of pages visited per session and 2) number of clicks to online services. These measures were based on research that showed users were typically not visiting to "browse" but to quickly perform a task and move on. As a result, the project aimed for a decrease in the first measure and an increase in the latter. To date we have seen a favourable 10% reduction in pages visited per session (with a corresponding decrease in session length). Regarding number of clicks to online services, we have seen significant improvements ranging between 10% and 50% since launch.