Website

Challenges

The ESC is Victoria’s independent regulator of the electricity, gas, water and sewerage, ports, taxis and rail freight industries. The website houses in excess of 10,000 documents across various industry sectors, including a substantive archive.

The biggest challenges for the redesign and development of the website were to develop consistent and precise information architecture driven by intuitive interface design for users to navigate over 10,000 documents.

Strategy

The previous website’s poor user interface was the key driver of the redevelopment project. Grindstone implemented an intensive stakeholder engagement process during the discovery, design and pre-launch phases for internal and external stakeholders. This included focus groups and user acceptance testing on Grindstone’s proprietary online UX testing platform. Detailed prototypes and workflows were produced to optimize user pathways.

Creating a robust information architecture and intuitive user interface across the industry sectors required intensive engagement processes to suit diverse end user and business requirements.

Outcomes

The ESC’s content required broad scale restructuring to improve usability and searching, and a powerful search engine was configured to promote easy access to specific content. A detailed document uploading and approval process was developed to streamline management of the content.

Grindstone developed a complex, custom re-classification taxonomy to facilitate the migration of content from the current website to the new system and we worked closely with all business units to facilitate their complex requirements in a way that would not compromise the functional integrity of the system. The new website has been described by external stakeholders as ‘much more intuitive and easier to navigate’.

Services

• Information Architecture
• Wireframes
• Website design & development
• CMS
• User Acceptance Testing