The challenge
The Office of the Public Advocate (OPA) advocates for the rights of vulnerable people. It assists the professionals who support vulnerable people and directly supports vulnerable people and their families.
The OPA website was trying to cater to several different audiences by providing the same content and services in different formats and styles, and often as attachments. The result was a confused website that hosted around 500 mostly hidden PDFs and documents that were rarely accessed.
The challenge was to identify and agree the primary audiences and redesign the structure and user interface for a new website that responded to user needs accordingly.
Our approach
Our user research included:
– staff interviews
– an expert usability analysis of the current website
– a content audit of 500+ documents, factsheets, brochures, and booklets hosted on the website
– an online Loop11 study tracking 25 users of the current website
– analysis of Google Analytics for the past year.
We took the time to understand the role and services that OPA provides so that we could identify content gaps, as well as duplicated and obsolete content.
I really like how it's (the new IA) set up to speak to people with disabilities first and foremost, and then the people that might have impairments in future and then the people that will support them.
Outcomes
The new site:
– better met the current and future business needs of OPA
– addressed the needs of key primary audiences who had very different user experience, content and service needs
– promoted two new and one emerging area of OPA’s services in the IA rather than in hidden PDFs
– had a clear delineation between OPA’s professional and vulnerable audience information and service needs
– highlighted the Public Advocate in the IA to promote the important statutory role
– included new UI designs for content pages to enable the majority of PDFs to be incorporated as html pages.
