The Office of the Children’s Guardian is a separate statutory agency in New South Wales, regulating and overseeing ​​organisations to uphold children and young people’s right to be safe. OCG is part of the Stronger Communities group of NSW government services whose mission is achieving just, safe, resilient and inclusive communities.

Digital Garden was engaged by the OCG Media & Communication team to completely transform their old website. Built on an outmoded CMS, the website’s information architecture had become unruly and made for a really poor user experience – even lacking a standard website main navigation.

Our multiphase project with OCG consisted of three main phases:

1. Discovery, UX and Content Strategy
2. Prototyping, UI design and Usability Testing
3. Development, Content Population and User Acceptance Testing

In the first phase, we worked with the Media & Communications team to create a content strategy and governance framework based upon a series of workshops held with the wider team of OCG stakeholders. Following that, an activity findings report was produced analysing a number of areas such as persona development, site precedents, card sorting for IA development and a proposed IA. The final deliverable was a user research report, containing results from a tree test and user survey. 

Phase 2 involved Digital Garden speaking to an array of users well-versed in using the old OCG website. The think-aloud usability testing sessions was extraordinarily useful in understanding what users thought of our website design and the content strategy behind it. It validated much of our approach and was also valuable for the OCG Media & Communications team to hear the thoughts of how content was structured on pages.

The user interface (UI) design was based upon the NSW Government’s NSW Design System, a digital toolkit of UI components, allowing for a consistent approach to UI and UX designers and engineers.

The third phase was the development of the new website onto Drupal 9. The thorough user acceptance testing by the client team ensured the solution was fit for purpose and adjustments made to make for the perfect frontend and backend user experience.

Digital Garden’s launch of the OCG website is yet another example of a depth of experience in creating websites and tools for departments and agencies in the Australian Government, NSW Government, Victorian Government and local government area councils across the country. We specialise in building government solutions on Drupal, GovCMS Drupal and WordPress.