[interview] the project story
Project Overview
The VicRoads website has around one million visits per month and is the second highest trafficked Government website in Victoria. The upgrade of this website is essential in helping VicRoads to deliver its services effectively to Victorians in this digital world.
Most Victorians will use the website to gain and renew their licences, renew registrations, and view road conditions. A key customer segment is the young learner driver who expects and prefers to conduct transactions online. The Learner Permit Practice Test is one of the most highly used parts of the website, yet provided an experience only usable on desktop.
The new website allows these key VicRoads customers to use the practice test in a way familiar with their lifestyle. Finding a Licensed Vehicle Tester to conduct a roadworthy has also been transformed into an easy, convenient experience through the new map interface. Customers can see personalised freeway times and other traffic information right from the home page.
The new site presents an outstanding user experience across any device, and sets the platform in place to provide a greater number of services online. It is leading the way with how government departments communicate and deliver services to the general public.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Project Brief
The main goals of redeveloping the VicRoads website were to enhance community perception of VicRoads with a reliable user friendly online presence, improve customer service through the dissemination of timely, accurate and accessible information, and provide an effective channel option for customers that will enable them to transact business with VicRoads online.
Over the previous five years, the web delivery environment had become overwhelmingly complex with multiple service arrangements and technology components. This delivered a disjointed user experience that continually took the user away from the main site. The new website aimed to integrate many of these existing systems to provide a seamless user experience.
The new VicRoads website has been implemented using responsive design so that it is optimised for any device. The site has over 700 pages of content, 1000 documents for download, and many interactive features such as up-to-date travel times & traffic conditions that can be personalized to the user’s location and a learner permit practice test to help people prepare for getting their ‘L’ plates. The site is integrated into many VicRoads backend systems facilitating a seamless user experience for changing your address or looking up Licensed Vehicle Testers via a map.
Project Need
Our vision for VicRoads was to create an online experience that meets their customers’ needs regardless of who they are, where they are, or what device they are on. A key strategic goal for VicRoads is to enhance customer self-service by making it easier for customers to find information and transact online so they have a reduced need to visit a customer service centre or call VicRoads.
The personalisation feature enabled us to display traffic and marketing content based on the user’s interactions with the site.
For content authors and publishers, our vision was to enhance productivity by providing a simple and intuitive authoring experience that was capable of delivering rich content to their target audience. Deloitte Digital implemented a preview site which enables all VicRoads staff to view pages in draft state on any device connected to their internal network. This greatly assists content owners tailor content to display optimally on a range of devices.
Reporting tools custom built within the CMS enable VicRoads stakeholders to understand how many customers are performing online transactions and to capture the data associated with any failed transactions.
User Experience
The old VicRoads website was not mobile friendly and did not support multi-devices. Site analytics demonstrated that visitors using mobile devices had risen to 40% over the previous year. Deloitte Digital’s user research also showed that most customers now expect to be able to complete tasks on different devices. This supported our recommendation for responsive design where there is no distinction for end users between mobile and desktop versions of the website.
The new design is clean, current and user-centred, allowing VicRoads customers to complete tasks and find information quickly and efficiently wherever they are. The content has been rewritten to be mobile first and interaction design patterns have been used to optimise the experience for mobile.
The website houses an abundance of forms and technical documents which have been notoriously difficult to find in the past. The tagging and categorisation of media library items enabled Deloitte Digital to build a repository of documents with a faceted search so that customers can find the forms they need easily.
Project Marketing
A key feature that enabled the team to deliver an outstanding user experience is the ability to personalise the site. The home page features travel time and incident information giving customers a snapshot of traffic conditions. By personalising traffic modules, the website is able to remember the customer’s preferences and display real-time traffic conditions relevant to them.
The information architecture has been made more intuitive and key content pages have been rewritten making it easier for customers to find the information they need. The New Unregistered Vehicle Permit application is available online for the first time and is already achieving 28% share across channels.
All transactions on the old website were external applications that took the user away from the main site resulting in a disjointed user experience. One example of this was “Change of Address” which received more complaints about its challenging user interface that any other feature on the website. The new Change of Address form has now been fully integrated into the site and been a huge success, having recorded a 24% increase in usage and is averaging 300 transactions a day higher despite less visits to the site.
Tags
Digital - Government Services
The provision of timely government services has been transformed as applications and sites are developed and implemented to either replace or complement previous methods. Be it the delivery of current and up to date critical information, compliance, community support and engagement, notification and registration or providing greater accessibility to government resources.
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