True North Content designed an evidence-based content strategy and roadmap to improve the Northern Territory Government’s NTG Central intranet. Working closely with the Department of Corporate and Digital Development (DCDD) we guided the team through a discovery phase, conducting extensive research to deliver clear, measurable recommendations for ongoing improvement to the site.
The challenge
Having worked with NTG previously, we were engaged to design a content strategy for their intranet, NTG Central. The government’s central intranet of 1,700 pages was reportedly facing issues around findability, search performance, and lack of governance (especially in publishing and maintenance).
Findings from our discovery phase validated the following challenges with the intranet’s current state:
- The search function prevents findability, not performing as staff expect it to.
- Navigation is hard and the pathway for staff to complete tasks is unclear. Many staff create their own workarounds. This is further complicated by a complex ecosystem of agency sites and external platforms.
- There is a lack of business rules and governance, which means content is not consistent or kept updated.
- The content is organised by topic, rather than task, making self-service difficult.
- Content and UX design are inconsistent.
Through interviews and a discovery workshop, we realised one of our key challenges would be balancing the business requirements of stakeholders with user needs. Stakeholders prioritised the need for improved governance and strategic delivery of information and services. Users were more focused on completing a task and were concerned with the intranet’s findability and usability.
Our approach
Understanding the NTG Central content ecosystem
We conducted an initial content audit of the intranet to understand the current state, particularly the content quality. We assessed usability, accessibility, reading grade level, audience, topics and general content design. This highlighted overall issues around navigation, accessibility, and readability.
NTG Central is just one point in the user’s information-seeking journey. We always consider how a platform fits into the broader ecosystem. By mapping several common tasks, we highlighted how complicated some of these journeys were. Information covered multiple platforms, sent the user on unnecessary loops and took several pages to complete a task or get the information they needed.
We never reinvent the wheel. Desktop research gave us valuable insight into what’s been done, findings from previous research (in this case, past surveys), and how our improvements can help DCDD achieve its strategic goals and align the work with government priorities.
Improving the information architecture (IA)
We refined NTG Central’s IA by collaborating with senior stakeholders, and running card sorting and treejack testing activities with users across government. Testing common tasks validated the structure of the new IA and helped us to organise the content in line with our users’ mental models.
We moved from a topic-based model to a task-focused structure. We improved the findability of top tasks and the visibility of core business functions (such as procurement). Based on our extensive experience with similar projects and feedback through our research, we also provided higher level recommendations to improve the search functionality.
Defining content types, content models and business rules
Collaborating with the core DCDD web team, we outlined content models for the intranet’s content types. We defined business rules for these to encourage consistent usage, ownership, and publishing and maintenance guidelines. This is to create a more predictable user experience and improve trust in the content (as a major source of frustration was outdated or incorrect information). Clear governance ensures all content is current, relevant and accurate.
The result
We delivered a content strategy and roadmap with measurement goals to ensure long-term success. Our roadmap outlines steps, goals and responsibilities to implement our recommendations and continually improve NTG Central. By involving the DCDD web team, senior digital working group and key stakeholders throughout the project, there were no surprises when we delivered the strategy. Teams were excited by the project’s progress and are keen to implement our recommendations to improve the intranet experience for their staff.
The content strategy included an extensive governance guide, including roles and responsibilities, business rules for content types and content models. Our new information architecture was tested and approved by the DCDD teams. We organised the content to meet the task-based needs of users, as well as highlighting priority content for business areas. We mapped existing pages to their new home on the intranet to assist the team with content migration.
Throughout the project we used research and testing methods to inform our strategy. The roadmap included measurement outcomes to use as checkpoints to ensure success. During the project, additional recommendations always emerge that are out of scope for the project. We delivered these additional recommendations to the DCDD team for future consideration.
