Rambling thoughts and observations

Notes from a presentation by Christine Murray, Manager, Website Services and Online for the Government Web Community, 19 November 2009.

Background
http://www.acc.co.nz/
The Website Services and Online team at ACC has two separate streams – the content team and development team. These teams sit outside External Comms team. This unit considers writing web content to be a specialist skill, and as such, do the entire web writing for the ACC website. The Web Services and Online team look after the static website; transactional applications are run by a different team.

Why redevelop?
The website wasn’t meeting the users needs. Users were getting lost and frustrated because they weren’t able to find things. The “Order Publications Online” function wasn’t being used – this was a high cost to ACC and was being wasted. The Call Centre was getting simple queries – this type of information should have been available online. There was also a “carte blanche” attitude towards putting information on the web – if someone had an idea for some content, it was added. They began to recognise, however, that the web channel was not always the right channel for some information.

The website needed:
• clear and reliable information that was easy to understand
• obvious, easy to use navigation
• improved accessibly

User focused design
1. Audience analysis – what users wanted and didn’t want; unique requirements of different types of users
2. Persona development – grouping differences and similarities together to assist with website development (the company Optimal Usability were contracted to do this work). The use of personas helped the project team to keep the users in mind. 6-7 personas were identified as having common behaviours. Personas consisted of – Helpful Helen, Financial Frank, Steamline Sina.
3. Testing – the site structure was tested with the users over three rounds of testing; the site design and layout was tested with the users. 466 external users assisted with testing. The staff at ACC were also trained by Optimal Usability in how to do effective user testing so that the next time it was needed, their team would have the capability to carry out the user testing themselves.
4. Tree Test Process – this was a good way to evaluate website structure; able to access success rate of common acc.co.nz tasks; used for clients, providers and business customers. The Tree Test consisted of a set of online questions and suggested links for answers. Results from this test were analysed. The original site structure success rate was measured against the redeveloped site structure success rate – e.g. old site success rate could be 40% and new site success rate could be 60%. Making changes to the website could be as simple as label changes. Plain language was used. Simple changes for labels – e.g. “Injury Prevention” became “Preventing Injury”.
5. User Testing – some testing was done in groups, some done over the phone, and occasionally staff were used for testing. A good sample group was used. The new sitemap is not much different from the old sitemap. The main change was to the labelling of the content. There were 6,000 pieces of content on the ACC website and the redevelopment exercise got rid of about 40% of the content.
6. Wireframe User Testing – tested what works and what doesn’t. There were three rounds of user testing – sketches; lo fi; and hi fi.
7. User Feedback – users didn’t want news, promos or spots on the home page. They weren’t keen on using images so the site is mostly textual. Users wanted main navigation to link to key areas. The advanced search function was also not used.

Design Concepts
The RFP process shortlisted three vendors. ACC wanted on their website, clarity of content which was easy to find. “DNA Design” won the contract. The old ACC website was news driven (promo tiles, news blocks). The analogy DNA Design used for the new look site was a travel guide.

Navigation on the new website goes across the page and uses colours for four main sections. The topics use clear and simple language. There are components of this website that can be read in six other languages, such as information on how to contact ACC. These are available for difference audiences – this is a different type of content than available in English, as engagement with users of other languages can be different.

The new site has a wide footer, which is another useful form of navigation. At the top of the home page is the “hero” image. Search is also at the top (there is an advanced search available too).

Metadata was applied appropriately to the new website. The old website had no metadata. On the second level pages there are standard items, e.g. “Contact Us” details in the 4th column (RH side). On the next level, navigation is on the RH side. All navigation was moved from the LH to the RH side. This website utilises “Power breadcrumbs”. It is cleaner and has less clutter on the pages.
An example of a “Power breadcrumb”.

The new website is a content site and has few graphics and is content driven. The old website acted as a news site with outdated information. ACC aims to drive users online to the publications section – this is for cost saving on sending out hardcopies of publications.

Delivery Approach
The content team reviewed the web content as part of this project. The content team has their own web writing standards. They focused on the needs of users using personas.

The website was released in phases, because of the amount of content and redesign. Oracle is used to deliver this website. The revamped website was delivered in three phases. First phase was delivered in December 2008 and included adding metadata and the new search function; the second phase which included most sections, was delivered in February 2009; and the third phase was delivered in April 2009.

Different instances of the CMS were used in the development of the website. A technical workaround was required to ensure that the old site continued to function while the new site was being added to it.

Google Analytics is used to measure site usage, as is Urchin, as this is used on the ACC Intranet.

Results – less people leave the new website; there are less “low value” calls to the Call Centre; the ACC website has won awards for use of Plain English (a complete turnaround from 2008 when they won a “brainstrain” award for their site!).

ACC Online
In Phase 1 of the project, strategy development and establishment were the key focus.

In Phase 2 there were three workstreams:
WS1 - Online quick wins (online forms, etc)
WS2 – Redesign acc.co.nz
WS3 – Develop a strategic roadmap

Phase 3 saw the release of extras and enhancements.

Originally, there was no online interaction. Online capabilities are not integrated. But now the website uses SMS alerts.

What Next?
• Require online maintenance and review of content
• Allow users to become comfortable with the new website
• Online capability to reflect the business
• Looking at revamping the Intranet
• Looking at a true online collaborative workspace e.g. Using Twitter.
• Having a COW – Central Online Workplace.

Questions/Answers
Business owners working together and the use of personas influenced the creation of a content-based site rather than a news driven site.

E-Gov Watch did an audit of the website. Because of delivering a website to personas, there is less use of active verbs.

Content that was ditched has been archived. 34% of the Providers section will be removed in the future. “Less is more”. It is hard to get the content owners to review their content, as it is not in their KPI’s to review.

Currently there are 8,000 pieces of content on the redesigned ACC website. This includes images. Verity is the search engine. There is no government policy on the ACC website.

Thanks to Gail Connelly for her contribution to this article.