The client plays a crucial role in Australia’s financial system. However, guidance on regulations was spread across disconnected PDFs in multiple formats.
This made it extremely time-consuming for the sector to quickly understand how to comply. In a rapidly evolving financial landscape, they needed a more agile way of communicating regulation.
The challenge
The client set out to develop a digital handbook so that regulated entities could easily:
- access current regulation
- understand the regulatory framework (or the relationships between the regulatory standards)
- get guidance and other related documents in the context of the framework.
The vision for the handbook was that:
- regulatory standards and related documents (documents) would be loaded into a custom app
- business users (or an AI tool) would enrich the documents with additional information, to help organise and create linkages between documents
- documents would be presented to users in various ways throughout the Handbook (such as on index pages, in search results, or as a full html version of each document).
This presented a huge technical and design challenge, but also required a strong content strategy to:
- support the technical and UX design
- assess the feasibility of different approaches to the document management
- enable wayfinding, tying the whole experience together with new content.
Our approach
True North Content has a proven process for approaching complex content projects. It includes a combination of deep research, communication and real-time collaboration.
We worked closely with product development agency Annex (the lead agency on this project) to uncover particular user stories that the Handbook would have to meet. The client was involved at every step, making this a truly collaborative process.
The discovery phase included workshops, interviews and desktop research (including a content audit). As we moved into solution design, the particular issues we saw were:
Managing content at scale: The handbook would have to house a huge amount of documents. We had to balance the need to add “connective” content with increasing the client’s future content burden.
Poor readability: legislative language snuck into the client’s content, making it difficult to read. New content required a plain English style to improve the quality and readability of the text. The client would need guidance to break existing content habits.
Wayfinding through complex content relationships: Relationships between documents were important but unclear. Users found it hard to get a complete picture of their legislative requirements. We would have to suggest ways to improve naming, labelling and organisation while working with approved regulatory standards (which are formal legislation).
We worked closely with service design and development to collectively develop the handbook’s Information Architecture and taxonomies. We also advised on search and other content findability features.
At the same time, we worked closely with the client through workshops, pair writing and a content pilot. We led the co-design of a detailed content style guide that streamlined the content production and review process.
The result
This project has demonstrated the important role of content in a technically demanding product. Having multiple perspectives on the experience and functionality of the handbook – particularly in the solution design and testing stages – meant all involved could raise challenges and make decisions at speed. This resulted in a more robust and useful final product.
The co-design process has built internal capability for this financial services regulator. It has created content champions eager to create human centred content in their roles beyond the handbook.
*The client’s name has been redacted
