Research & Strategy
Established in 1823, the Parliament of New South Wales (PNSW) is one of the oldest continuous parliamentary institutions in the world. At the centre of Australia’s colonial history, its function continues as the seat of governance and authority for the state, where, with input from the public, policy-making and the introduction of laws are at the core of its mission.
More recently, the PNSW arrived at an inflexion point where it identified a need to drive interest and engagement with the institution. And so, it embarked on a digital transformation outlined in its Communications, Engagement, and Education Strategy, to target strategic priorities: strengthen engagement, improve access, enable participation, support visitation, and ultimately build trust in the PNSW.
PNSW faced a critical challenge in enhancing public interest and engagement, both politically and culturally. Despite its significance, there was a lack of awareness and participation in parliamentary proceedings, hindering its democratic mandate and efforts to promote transparency, accountability, and public trust in government.
With a diverse and increasingly digitally adept population, modernising engagement strategies was crucial to connect with the public and, in particular, marginalised communities and First Nations peoples.
To address these problems, a fundamental understanding was needed to drive clarity and purpose within the digital transformation team, and a roadmap to set the transformation on course.
Aligned the PNSW project team and senior stakeholders on the the important issues that needed to be addressed.
Delivered a vision that illustrated how issues might be addressed in a redesign.
Galvanised the project team’s focus through defining guiding principles for the project.
Prioritised of 39 recommendations to inform a roadmap to deliver on the goals of the strategic priorities.
The purpose of this project was to understand the institution and community’s needs to inform any redesign and build of a new web platform in support of the organisation’s strategic digital transformation objectives. I looked through 3 lenses to inform the broader recommendations for the next phases.
Organisational context
Understand all aspects of the project from an internal point of view to capture needs and expectations.
Audience perspective
Gain a greater understanding of the needs and requirements of both the internal and external users of PNSW platforms.
Context, trends and externalities
Audit the current ecosystem and review of the site activity of peers, competitors and inspirations to understand current and emerging practices.
Primary research was conducted with a multi-faceted approach that included qualitative and quantitative methods to gather comprehensive insights. These included:
Furthermore, a health check of the web assets was conducted. This included a jobs-to-be-done analysis (JTBD), information architecture (IA) analysis, a feature audit, ecosystem mapping and a review of Google Analytics.
I held interviews and focus groups with stakeholders whose use of the platform was necessitated by their day-to-day function within parliament. This included stakeholders from the Communications & Engagement, Education, and Indigenous Community Outreach teams as well as House Senior Executives, Members, staff and department staff from the Legislative Assembly and Legislative Council.
One-to-one interviews and focus group workshops, with participant numbers ranging from eight to fourteen, were designed and conducted remotely using Google Meet.
Interview outputs were recorded for analysis, whilst the workshop outputs were captured in Miro. These sessions aimed to:
Findings highlighted an institution whose inner workings were out of touch with its constituents, many of whom were vulnerable, and also revealed that PNSW was an institution unable to effectively showcase its work in ways that were trustworthy or engaging. Particularly to migrant audiences with low levels understanding.
Furthermore, the complexity of the existing platform pointed to areas that suffered significantly through fragmented and unreliable processes, and outdated technology. It was also clear that high-value optimisation was achievable through the implementation of best practice UX; such as de-duplicating navigation, simplifying way-finding and improving internal search.
A sample of stakeholder outputs captured with initial clustering in Miro
"Members of public may want to make a submission but not know how to do that."
"Showcase the work of parliament in ways that are interesting and engaging."
"Duplication means you can't remember where you found something."
These insights formed the basis of ongoing investigations and discussions with external partners and community members with whom I wanted to validate these areas of concern.
External partners played a vital role in supporting the functions of governance and law-making. These included the Parliamentary Council, the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and many Government Agencies.
Interviews with were conducted as one-to-one discussions and recorded for analysis. During these interviews, participants were encouraged to demonstrate their use of the platform.
These observations highlighted high-touch workflows and workarounds in an overly complex information architecture and 3rd party ecosystem where workflows had been adapted to increase efficiency and reduce friction.
Whilst it was agreed that improvements to the platform were desperately needed, the prospect created unease and anxiety, indicating the need to manage the change with a high degree of rigour and diligence.
Any healthy democracy cannot function without ongoing input and advocacy from community members, leaders, education groups and activists; whether in metropolitan or rural areas.
Research with community groups were conducted remotely as 1-hour focus groups. Outputs were recorded and captured for analysis on Miro.
This consultation provided much-needed insight into the unique challenges, and frustrations when attempting to engage with the institution. Particularly those from Aboriginal and culturally and linguistically diverse audiences who had little affinity with the old colonial guard mindset.
The insights were essential to:
"Not clear when the bill was updated."
"Parliament is not seen as a safe place. Natural feeling of mistrust from this [Aboriginal] community."
"It’s hard to get our voices heard."
The purpose of looking at peers, competitors and inspiration is to identify insights and trends to inform the redesign of the PNSW platform.
A PCI analysis allowed me to explore a number of in- and out-of-category platforms that set the standard in terms of information architecture complexity and overall user engagement. I focussed on key issues that had surfaced in the Project Context, and Stakeholder and Community consultation to identify best practice relevant to the Parliament of New South Wales.
Through the lens of peers, we look to see what is happening in our domain around the globe.
With the competitor review, we identify potential threats and opportunities to strengthen our offering to our constituents.
In looking at inspiration in related industries we look for best practices that are shaping expectations now and in the future.
This included:
A distillation of the key trends identified through the PCI analysis.
To close the loop on the inputs from the research, I focussed on the PNSW platform health where I carried out the following activities.
Utilising the outputs from the interviews and focus groups, I conducted a high-level JTBD analysis to understand key tasks that specific internal and external stakeholders and community members performed. This helped to understand the key outcomes sought in high-trafficked workflows for specific audience types.
I assessed the IA to review the pain points that surfaced from the stakeholder and community consultation. Coupled with an understanding of the JTBD, I formulated a hypothesis about the ambiguity experienced by users in the primary and secondary navigation. I continued to triage this perceived issue when reviewing Google Analytics.
I conducted a review of Google Analytics to understand usage, access and audience characteristics such as age and gender. I also deep dived into particular flows to understand and validate assumptions about audience browsing behaviour as impacted by primary and secondary navigation. The insights informed key recommendations related to simplifying navigation.
A light-touch UX and design review of features was undertaken to evaluate accessibility, components, placement, hierarchy and attributes concerning contemporary design standards and best practices. Furthermore, it allowed the design team to get a sense of how expansive the list of user interface components was for a design system.
I reviewed the platform ecosystem to identify current platforms, integration points, software and system owners for ongoing engagement. It was also necessary to understand the purpose and intended use of the platforms. The process highlighted knowledge gaps for future discovery.
To support the pillars of Parliament’s digital transformation strategy, and in collaboration with key project stakeholders, I facilitated the definition of guiding principles.
Recommendations from the stakeholder and community consultation were clustered and themed to shape up five principles for the project.
Principles were underscored with How Might We statements to seed the project team with ideas.
The visual design team took the reigns to bring the future PNSW platform to life through vision concepts. These concepts focussed on key themes as informed by the audience research and PCI analyses.
The concepts referenced the guiding principles to illustrate their role in guiding future design.
Finally, it was time to frame all the insights and learnings from the discovery into actionable next steps.
17 ‘must have’ recommendations were reviewed and prioritised with the Parliament teams to inform ideation and the plan of a project roadmap. The roadmap spanned 3 key horizons to set Parliament on course for initiating the re-platforming project.
Importantly, the work aligned stakeholders at the Parliament of New South Wales around key issues and outcomes.
Strategic plan presented as horizons
