Discovering Australia’s doorways to the world

I led a program of Discovery at Hide and Seek Digital to gain a foundational understanding of the users of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT)’s approximately 111 websites and portals across the world, their needs and behaviours, the existing service ecosystem and the DFAT stakeholders that work with the websites.

The problem

Our program of Discovery aimed to solve the following problems:

1 Who are the primary user groups for the DFAT core site and consular (post) sites?
2 What tasks do these users try to achieve?
3 How well are users currently able to complete those tasks?

With this information, we could help DFAT understand and clearly define the purpose for each site in their ecosystem. We would also provide recommendations about how to improve the overall experience with design, content, and tech using insights from each project stream.

As Design Lead at Hide and Seek Digital, I led the program of Discovery across DFAT’s global ecosystem of websites to uncover whether they have a relevant mandate and cohesive purpose, as many of the consular ‘post’ websites were outdated, inconsistent and exposed due to obsolete platforms.

The program was broken down into four groupings – the core website (dfat.gov.au), the 106 post websites, 3 Ministerial websites and the Free Trade Agreement Portal. My team conducted a comprehensive program of research across these facets of the DFAT ecosystem that included Discovery and content workshops, user testing, UX audits, interviews, quantitative surveys, content audits, IA mapping, governance reviews, technical ecosystem mapping, feature mapping, and requirement gathering.

Example of Journey Map

At the time this was Hide and Seek’s largest and most ambitious body of research, and the team had a massive amount of data to synthesise into four comprehensive Discovery reports and an overarching Executive Summary Report that summarised findings from all the tranches of the program. I presented the findings in person to the Executive of DFAT.

I moderated 3 hour-long Discovery workshops for each stream (Core, Post, Ministerial, and FTA Portal), where subject-matter experts and stakeholders felt heard, sharing their concerns and pain points with the websites from an internal perspective. 

Discovery workshop

My team conducted user testing on the current-state websites with real users in Australia, Canada, India and the UK, and conducted desktop audits of the site(s) according to UX design principles. We gathered content-related information by auditing 20 sample pages of the core website and 50 pages across 5 post websites, ‘Treejack’ testing the IA and interviewing content owners and publishers. We took a technical deep dive, mapping, gathering and interviewing, as well as conducting a platform replacement market scan.

User testing

We used the insights and data analytics from these research activities to help identify groups with unique attributes and their journey maps, then we crafted further research activities such as quantitative surveys to test a range of different audience groups. With the combined knowledge of their experiences, we gained a granular understanding of the issues faced by each group with the different categories of website and defined the top 5 reasons users visited the DFAT websites.

DFAT represents a very complex digital ecosystem, with embassies, high commissions, consulates, multilateral missions and representative offices in countries all over the world having online presences, alongside the main dfat.gov.au site and ministerial sites. Alongside these, DFAT controls the more recently built Smartraveller website and passports.gov.au. Making sense of where visitors can find information within the ecosystem presented a unique challenge, with the same information present in multiple locations. In many cases, DFAT’s sites act as conduits through to other government agencies and departments where users were channelled to find relevant information. Understanding, synthesizing and presenting the challenges for users navigating the ecosystem identified key recommendations for improvement and evolution of DFAT’s digital products.

A large part of the Discovery program focused upon the entire ecosystem of websites lacking a consistent platform. I identified an opportunity to apply a unified headless solution, including a headless design system, to combat outdated and repeated content, as well as bring governance under a centralised model.

By conducting qualitative research with real users we were able to deliver insights into the main reasons users were interfacing with DFAT’s sites by identifying top tasks people were undertaking, or attempting to undertake. The results were quite surprising and illustrated that assumptions had been made that did not gel with actual experiences.

By doing a deep dive with employees, stakeholders and SME’s from DFAT I was able to map what they believed the purpose of the sites should be, in order to be supportive of the department’s central mission. By presenting back the evidence gathered we defined the differences between actual user experiences and departmental expectations.