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Darwin City Council Website: Australia's Most Usable
When we first began scoping out Darwin City Council’s new website development over a year ago, we knew we had the opportunity to create Australia’s best city council website. Now that it’s been delivered, our vision has been realised, with the site scoring highest in a usability study of Australia’s capital city council websites. Awesome!
A total of 600 study participants were asked to complete a range of simple tasks on each website, and in the end, Darwin City Council came out on top. In fact, the site we created was the only website to achieve a score over 70% in the three areas that were measured: effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.
Usability, in a nutshell is the extent to which users can interact with a product to achieve specific desired tasks. In website development, usability is crucial to ensure that users are able to do what they want to do or find the information they need on the site quickly and effectively, without having to think too hard. If they can’t, the sad fact is no matter how beautiful a site is, or how important the information, visitors will just click away and seek help elsewhere.
How do you make such a giant website so usable, you ask?
We loved the challenge when Darwin City Council first asked Captovate to get involved in the development of their new website. Our first step was to undertake a comprehensive scoping study to get a clear picture of what was wanted and needed on the site, and the issues that needed to be overcome. Of course, not every website we develop needs to get into this level of web analysis, but when it comes to a site as large and complex as Darwin City Council’s, with so many different audiences and varying functions, it was crucial.
Once we’d collected all this information, we used what we knew to create an information architecture that would work for the website, helping people to find what they need intuitively and quickly. This was no mean feat when you consider that we were working with up to 400 separate pieces of information at times – thank god for whiteboards and sticky notes is all I can say!
From there, it was just a matter of building the site with a super intuitive navigation structure in the Drupal Content Management System, which is perfect for managing huge complex sites with lots of users and information types flying around, and bada bing, bada boom – we had Australia’s most usable council website!
