Sector(s)

Project Team

Other organisations involved:

Victorian Government

Team members:

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Organizations Involved

Community contributions

On this project, we contributed back user research and IA learnings to SDP to contribute towards its continuous improvement model.

Salsa Digital worked with a Victorian government department to conduct detailed user research and build a new website that delivers a better user experience. This site also marks the first client implementation using Victoria's Single Digital Presence, which is built on Drupal.

Note: Due to a strict media/communications policy, unfortunately, we can’t name this department.

About the project

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Victorian Government’s challenge

Our client’s services were buried in its parent department’s website and, many agencies were unaware of the branch and the services it offered. The client needed a new website to help streamline its services and market its services across Victorian government departments. 

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Victorian Government’s transformation

This website project had two distinct streams, the site build itself and extensive user research. For much of the project, these streams ran concurrently, feeding into each other as necessary.

In terms of the site build, first SDP’s out-of-the-box solution was validated. The site uses the SDP core (base functionality) plus a module for customisations to the colour palette (to reflect our client’s brand). Using SDP to set up the new site meant the site build was quick and easy. The toolkit of components is comprehensive and met all of our client’s needs. SDP is a headless instance of Drupal. 

This site marks the first client implementation of SDP (independent of the SDP alpha project and the two pilot sites, the Governor of Victoria website and the Department of Treasury and Finance website).

User research

During the planning stage, Salsa Digital also conducted extensive user research to help establish the information architecture (IA), make design adaptations and adjust labelling and content to help better meet user needs.

The user research component of the project was broken into six stages:

  1. Preliminary user research
  2. User pathways for IA
  3. User research surveys and IA refinement
  4. IA tree testing
  5. User interaction testing on high-fidelity, clickable prototypes
  6. High-fidelity prototype AB testing (testing two variants)
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The outcomes

The new site delivers many benefits, including:

  • A new site to market our client’s services and increase visibility internally
  • A site built on extensive user research to create the most intuitive content pathways
  • A better citizen experience through tested components and design
  • User-validated design and IA
  • Reduced build costs because the site is built on SDP (Victoria’s whole-of-government platform built on Drupal)
  • The ability to contribute user research and IA learnings back to SDP to contribute towards its continuous improvement model
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Why Drupal was chosen

Drupal is the CMS of choice for the Victorian Government in Australia. In 2018, Victoria's Department of Premier and Cabinet and Salsa Digital built a headless Drupal instance as part of a new open source, whole-of-government platform, Single Digital Presence. Drupal was chosen as the CMS and is being used to drive consolidation and an open source community within the Victorian Government. Single Digital Presence consists of three products — Bay (an open-source platform based on Lagoon), Tide ( a Drupal CMS distribution) and Ripple coupled with Nuxt (the frontend presentation layer).

Graphical image of two laptops side by side with people around them.

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Single Digital Presence was chosen as a whole-of-government solution that aims to consolidate government websites across the state of Victoria in Australia.