The challenge
An out-of-date website that left users struggling to find the information they required due to the search function not working.
The solution
An award-winning Government website built on Kentico, that has an improved user navigation and seamless admin editing experience.
The results
A modernised brand, accessible design, and standout features, solidifying the City's position as a leader among WA local governments.
About City of Joondalup
The City of Joondalup is one of the biggest local councils in Perth, WA. Over 10,000 people use the site daily, but poor user experience (UX) and limited accessibility were causing widespread dissatisfaction. Being a massive local council, the City needed a new, state-of-the-art website.
The new site created by ALYKA offers seamless one-click calling, email, and directions, faster load times, easier access to information, and integration with third-party systems. The City now has a modern, functional, and accessible website built on the Kentico CMS, with a UX informed by community input and comprehensive user research.
The challenge
The new website needed to effectively serve a wide range of audiences. In particular, the City wanted more residents, ratepayers, local businesses, and tourists to use the site, have an enjoyable experience, and return to it over time. They also hoped that a better-quality, accessible site would decrease the number of general phone calls and customer queries they received, reducing their administrative burden.
The previous website was a source of frustration for both internal and external users. Many found the search functionality difficult to use and would instead search Google directly. The new site needed enhanced search functionality and a more logical site map that would be easier for users to navigate.
The City also had a number of legacy APIs they had developed in-house. We needed to find a way to preserve their utility while effectively integrating them with the new site’s systems.
The solution
User research
We undertook comprehensive community consultation to better understand how end-users interact with the City’s website.
We began by hosting focus group interviews, during which we spoke to Joondalup residents about the site and their information preferences. These interviews helped us learn what was working, what wasn’t, and what content was most important to site users. During this session, we also tested our proposed Information Architecture (IA) by asking the residents to perform several tasks while navigating through it, a research method known as tree testing. The results of the Tree Testing and a subsequent user debrief interview revealed the following insights:
- Participants completed 100% of tasks in under a minute, indicating they did not experience significant challenges navigating the proposed IA
- Participants found some of the labels used in the IA too ambiguous, indicating a need for clearer language
Following this stage, we began work on a new homepage design. We wanted to ensure that our design considered the needs of the City’s internal stakeholders, their organisational priorities and the needs of residents.
Once the site development and content population phases concluded, we undertook another round of Community Consultation to validate our improvements to the IA. We used Tree Testing and asked participants to respond to open-ended questions and rating scales. We also implemented usability testing, which required users to complete tasks within the new site itself. This testing process validated our new IA and revealed the following insights:
- Participants noted the improved functionality, visual attractiveness and logical navigation of the new site
- Over 80% of participants rated the new site as either useful or extremely useful
Prior to the site launch, we conducted a final round of Community Consultation that focused on the new search tool and testing its usability. We asked participants to complete task scenarios by finding information using the search tool on both the old and new websites. We then analysed the results to determine the accuracy and usability of the new website compared to the old site. Compared to the previous website, the new site’s search tool performed more effectively, and users reported a more satisfactory search experience.
Integrations
We integrated the website with several third-party systems, including:
LINCS Community Directory App: LINCS is a third-party, searchable community directory. By integrating with this app, website visitors can now use category and suburb filters to easily search for community groups, resident and ratepayer associations, support services and more.
Campaign Monitor: The City has 14 email lists and previously, if a user unsubscribed from one list, they inadvertently unsubscribed from all lists. We created a custom integration that allows users to subscribe or unsubscribe from multiple lists. We also created a custom subscription tool, allowing users to manage their subscription preferences from the website itself.
City of Joondalup internal systems: The City had a number of legacy APIs that had been developed in-house for their internal systems, including:
- Minutes and Agendas
- CarPark
- Projects
- Job Vacancies
- Bin and verge collection
Working alongside Kentico, our team successfully integrated with these APIs.
Accessibility
The City’s new website needed to be WCAG 2.1 AA compliant. The large size of the sitemap could have made this a time-consuming task, but we streamlined the process by creating and using page templates within Kentico. By doing this, page templates only needed to be tested for accessibility once rather than individually for each page created, allowing us to create an accessible site with extreme efficiency.
Security
Being Local Government, website security was a strong focus. The website has top-tier security in place, including regularly applying security patches to address potential vulnerabilities and maintain a secure environment. We have implemented a robust backup architecture that protects and archives file-level data. Backups are automatically created on a daily basis with the following archival plan: 7 daily, 4 weekly, 1 annual.
When it comes to content management, we created multiple user roles and assigned relevant permissions as a further security measure and to keep the site information accurate. For example, a “community consultation and news editor role was created, with permissions to only edit those pages, whilst a “community consultation, news and events editor” has the additional ability to also edit events.
The results
