Project Overview
Where are you going this weekend?
So many web services are clambering to answer this question. The National Parks and Wildlife Services (NPWS) was faced with the mammoth task of elevating the diversity of its stunning and stirring spaces to an audience awash with options. Compounding its challenge, was its broader mandate to protect and share the environment and heritage of NSW. This extends to everything from letting you know of National Parks closures and emergencies in progress, booking your romantic weekend at the Smoky Cape Lighthouse Keepers' Cottages and helping you work with the Threatened species volunteering programme.
In discharging its mandate NPWS has a vast number of products, services and conservation that it’s responsible for, but there was very low brand awareness and our research indicated it was only seen as a regulator for fines and passes.
Project Commissioner
Office of the Environment and Heritage NSW
Project Creator
Adelphi Digital - Reading Room Australia
Project Brief
The National Parks and Wildlife Services (NPWS) in Australia partnered with Reading Room to craft nothing short of a digital revolution, aimed at:
• Creating an immersive, informative destination to encourage participation in park visitation and volunteering;
• Building awareness around the NPWS brand, products and services;
• Ensuring any incidents in National Parks are reported effectively.
The stunning website features responsive web design, an intricate search functionality for over 850 national parks and 1,500 attractions, a real-time alerts system, spatial search and Google Maps integration. Its multi-channel delivery system has reduced operational inefficiencies and empowered wider NPWS employees. This is done by allowing individual content components to be applied across the entire site, while pages are dynamically built to offer maximised real estate and flexibility for various promotional requirements.
To achieve this goal we performed extensive internal and external research to understand and determine business objectives, marketing objectives, marketing initiatives and most importantly, the digital goals of end users.
With a large number of moving parts within the organisation, multiple focus groups, workshops, and interviews were conducted to pinpoint how the company can leverage off the website, to create a shared vision and achieve the goals of each working group.
Project Innovation/Need
The vast amount of information underpinning this site threw up a unique set of challenges. However, the robust user engagements allowed us to transform this into a unique opportunity.
The Office of Environment and Heritage were siting on a treasure trove of unique and beautiful content that was hidden from users through a clunky information architecture. It became clear quite quickly that users needed multiple entry points into the rich content. It was not good enough to let users find things through a single path, but instead we interlaced content across the site opening up organic user pathways that could be self determined – not prescribed.
The heart of this was an intuitive search and a set of technically complex filtering mechanisms that are displayed to the user in a simple, friendly and intuitive way that draws them deeper into the site.
Backed by user research, we implemented a geo-located set of activities for users to choose from. Potential visitors can explore parks and activities near them, right from the navigation itself as opposed to having to explore through elaborate geographic categories. In addition, they can explore other regions through a fully interactive map with research backed filtering options.
Design Challenge
NPWS is an organisation with a wealth of information, with a wide spectrum of valuable content for multiple audience types.
The website design had to strike a fine balance to leverage off existing information and present this without sacrificing on user experience and engagement.
The designs had to factor in the primary and secondary audience use cases, so relevant functionality and content were surfaced throughout each user journey.
Content was housed in consistent template layouts with enough visual cues to distinguish the variation of content.
Search functionality and controls had to be simple and familiar throughout a large variety of visitor offerings.
Designs were informed through multiple research avenues, including previous website design/UX reviews, internal/external works shops and paper prototype testing with external users.
User Experience
User experience design was based on the 1-on-1 interviews with different audience groups.
With thorough user testing in place, we had a clear indication of how users intend to use the site and what they expect of the site. Our findings were then translated into personas, which was a great way for us to verify our decisions to ensure that our solutions were created with realistic user scenarios in mind. For example user testing was performed with a prototype to determine if users were able to achieve high-priority tasks, our findings then informed further improvement.
Our personas and user research informed us of how content should be surfaced, what the user consider as intuitive functionality, and most importantly, ensuring that functionality is familiar and intuitive, coupled with relevant content.
A discovery approach was crafted to offer enough information for users to explore, but also to provide clear guidance for more detailed or focus at the same time.
Ultimately the visual appeal and succinct content educates the users of the NPWS brand and what the organisation stands for.
Tags
Digital Experience - Website
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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