To effectively serve our customers, we need to know who they are and what they need and expect from us.
Archetypes and personas for nsw.gov.au
Foundational research identified four broad groups of customers for nsw.gov.au, which we call archetypes. These archetypes have largely similar needs, aims and goals when accessing government information:
- Citizen
- Business
- Visitor
- Public servant
We use these archetypes as a guiding principle to organise content and provide navigation on the site. You can see this broadly in action in our main navigation menu:
- Living in NSW is aimed at the citizen archetype
- Working and business is aimed at business and citizen
- What's happening is for citizen and visitor
We also use the archetypes to create audiences, which in turn lets us target content to different groups using our personalisation technology. See Audience tagging for more information.
Within our archetypes we have further identified a set of personas. Personas represent different kinds of ‘typical’ customers. We use personas to build empathy with our users and focus on their world, to better meet their needs.
Check and update
We continuously check and update our understanding of customers through ongoing research projects. These could be audience-based research, taking a deep-dive into particular groups of customers, or more targeted research to verify a feature is understandable and useful.
Understanding your customers
Understanding your audience and how they are interacting with your content is one of the keys to creating truly useful and high-performing content.
Qualitative, deep user research is the best way to get a real understanding, for example by creating personas. You can find more information about creating personas in the Digital Services Toolkit from Digital NSW: Creating and using personas.
However, it can be time consuming and expensive to do the level of qualitative research required.
The good news is that we provide a number of tools you can use to get some of this information, to help you start understanding your customers and improving your content:
- Google Analytics provides data on who is viewing your content, and how they interact with various components. See:
- Page feedback from visitors is captured through the Thumbs Up Thumbs Down (TUTD) widget. You can use this data to get a feel for what customers think of your content. See:
Need any more help?
If you have any questions, or require assistance with anything mentioned in this article, submit a request via the webform.