The nsw.gov.au website is designed to provide a single location for customers to source NSW government information. The OneCX Program works with agencies across government to bring their content onto the site.
The CX (customer experience) Toolkit informs our principles for designing and maintaining the site. Everything from understanding our customers, to designing the templates and components, and how we organise the content. It also provides guidance on meeting standards around brand, accessibility, and usability.
Understanding our customers
To effectively serve our customers, we need to know who they are and what they need and expect from us.
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.
You may like to consider creating personas for your content. The Digital Services Toolkit provides information about creating and using personas.
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.
Design
The visual design of nsw.gov.au takes guidance from both the NSW Government Brand guidelines and the NSW Digital Design System.
We use the standards to ensure a consistent and distinctive visual identity across the site, by creating a set of templates, components, and elements for you to use when building and managing your pages.
When you're building your pages, your starting point should always be the CMS Components Guide. This gives you detailed guidance on the components and features available specifically for nsw.gov.au.
nsw.gov.au Brand Framework
As the face of the NSW Government, nsw.gov.au falls into the Masterbrand brand category, and uses the Masterbrand corporate colour palette. The design of pages and components aligns to the NSW Digital Design System.
The site can also support Co-Brand agencies with agency-specific logos and non-corporate colour palettes, as well as campaigns, key strategies and products with non-corporate colour palettes.
To provide a consistent user experience and unified design language, only the colour palette and agency-specific logo are variable. The underlying design of pages, templates and components - the design system - is consistent across the entire site, regardless of brand category.
The nsw.gov.au Brand Framework explains how brand intersects with nsw.gov.au and how colours, elements and components can be used to create different visual identities within the design language of the site.
Managing content
Content on nsw.gov.au is organised in line with customer needs and expectations. Most content sits within one of our 20 main topics, making it easy for customers to find what they need without needing to know which government agency provides the service or information.
More information about our information architecture.
See Content writing and design and the Editorial style guidelines for guidance on writing compelling and useful digital content for nsw.gov.au.
Accessibility and inclusivity
Everything we do on nsw.gov.au is underpinned by our commitment to accessibility and inclusivity.
The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 requires agencies to ensure people with disabilities have equal access to information and services. All NSW Government digital products and services must meet the current version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) to level AA
The NSW Accessibility and Inclusivity Toolkit is an invaluable resource and provides extensive guidance on ensuring your content is accessible and usable by all of our customers.
nsw.gov.au and WCAG
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) are international technical standards which aim to make web content accessible to people with disabilities.
As a NSW Government site, we are committed to ensuring nsw.gov.au meets the current version of WCAG (2.2) to AA level.
We use an accessibility by design approach, where accessibility considerations are included from the very beginning, through design and development. All features and functionality are thoroughly tested against the WCAG standards, and using various assistive technologies, before release.
Ongoing monitoring
We constantly monitor the site for accessibility issues using tools such as SiteImprove. We’re happy to say we routinely exceed our target score of 84% compliance site-wide.
Additionally, we regularly engage accessibility specialists to run independent accessibility audits across the site and are committed to promptly rectifying any issues identified.
Your responsibilities
Accessibility is everyone's responsibility. If you manage and publish content, you can do your part by following the accessibility guidance when creating and maintaining your content.
Easy Read
Easy Read is a specific technique to create content designed for people with intellectual disability, low literacy or low English proficiency. Read more about Easy Read.
You can also visit the Easy Read hub to see our current Easy Read content. The hub will continue to expand over the coming months.
CALD audiences
Another key audience we must consider is customers who are part of culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities.
Following the guidelines for writing in plain English helps all of your users understand your content. Well written content that has a reading age of Grade 9 or lower also provides a more accurate basis for machine translations such as Google Translate.
You can also read guidance on communicating with CALD communities, which provides useful insights into how you can most effectively communicate with these customers. The CALD Guidance Tool provides detailed actionable insights based on extensive research.
Translation
We provide the Google Translate automated translation feature across all pages of nsw.gov.au. While this is a useful starting point for customers, remember that it is a machine translation, and as such may not be entirely accurate.
For high priority, critical content, we recommend investing in professional, human translations.
See I want to make content on nsw.gov.au accessible for CALD communities for more information.
New features and continuous improvement
As we introduce new features and functionality to the site, we are committed to a program of ongoing research, so that we continually test and learn.
In this we are guided by methodologies outlined in the NSW Digital Service Toolkit, particularly the Design Standards and project phases explained the Delivery Manual.
New features are introduced as agencies with new requirements come onto the site, or where the nsw.gov.au teams identify a particular need.
You can request a new feature through the new feature request form.
We also undertake a program of continuous improvement, where we monitor and review the performance of components and templates to make sure they continue to deliver for both agencies and our customers. If you would like to suggest a change or improvement to an existing component or template, raise a request.
Need any more help?
If you have any questions, or require assistance with anything mentioned on this article, submit a request via the webform.