Reimagining the user experience for CASA

CASA’s challenge

As part of CASA’s website redevelopment, CASA was moving from GovCMS Drupal 7 to GovCMS Drupal 8/9 and wanted to use the opportunity to uplift its digital brand and improve the user experience with a refreshed design.  CASA’s internal team went a long way in imagining the new site but needed a web partner to create highly polished designs, interactive components and a digital style guide. 

CASA’s transformation — validated, confident, and visually appealing

Salsa Digital invited our design partners, Oliver Grace, to team up and deliver user research and final website designs. The experience designer on the project was Adam Walton, a former Salsarian and government design aficionado who’d recently taken on a full-time role at Oliver Grace.

Oliver Grace is a creative studio that brings purposeful ideas to life through engaging and meaningful design. Delivering impactful outcomes for organisations with purpose, their mission is clear and simple: design for good.

We kicked off by reviewing the existing wireframes that formed the foundations of the new site design, followed by creating additional wireframes to fill in some of the unknown scenarios. 

User testing

Qualitative user testing was carried out on both high-fidelity, branded concepts and mid-fidelity designs, all produced in Figma. One-on-one interviews were conducted with a diverse set of five CASA website users.  The user testing covered:

• A/B testing (testing two different versions) of the homepage to compare appeal, tone-of-voice and navigation experience
• Navigating into deeper levels of the site — from the landing and category pages, down to the content pages
• Submitting an enquiry via the contact page
• Filtering via search results
• Brand awareness and appeal of a campaign site

Participants were asked a series of open-ended questions, such as:

• How’s your experience with the main menu?
• How does a clean, white page compare with one that shows a mix of dark and light sections, e.g. a darker main menu and news section? (see image below)
• Do you find that real photography and illustrations add to the design’s appeal or detract from it?
• Do you still know where you are at this point?
• If you could change one thing about what you just saw, what would it be?

Following user testing, the feedback was consolidated into common patterns, prioritised, and then actioned during the final design rollout within Figma. The completed mobile and desktop designs were packaged along with a digital style guide and a component library of assets to support CASA’s developers in the frontend build of the site, and to provide a clearer direction for CASA’s brand uplift.

“Salsa Digital and Oliver Grace spent time with us discussing our requirements and coming to an understanding of our vision for the new website. They provided high-fidelity design files for selected views and components, which have allowed us to complete wireframes for the remaining views and progress swiftly with building the new website. The report and recommendations provided following the user testing gives us additional evidence base. The digital style guide and component library that they delivered is excellent and is one of the most comprehensive our developers have seen.”

Amanda Palmer
Stakeholder Communications Manager
Engagement, Communication and Safety Education Branch
CASA

The outcomes — improved user experience

• A high-fidelity, interactive prototype of new designs and components
• High quality, user-centric designs and components, validated through user testing
• A digital style guide to support the direction of the new CASA brand
• A component library of assets to support the developers for site build
• Validated, user-tested components that can be fed into Salsa’s new, open source GovCMS D9 design system: Civic Theme