As an essential service with high brand recognition, RMS was attracting 10 million people a year to its website. The problem was, many of them were taking an accidental detour.
The problem
In 2019, NSW Roads and Maritime Service (RMS) sought to update its customer website with refreshed content and a new content management system.
Customers using the site found it difficult to complete tasks or find the information they were looking for. The information was often difficult to understand, with readability scores averaging at university level. And to make matters worse, many visitors to the site were there to renew their licence or registration – transactions that could only be done through RMS’ sibling agency, Service NSW.
No sooner had a team been recruited to tackle the challenge than RMS was consolidated into the Transport for NSW cluster, and the state government began a program of work to amalgamate websites across NSW government.
My approach
I was brought on as a content design lead for the project, but the scale of the undertaking, the relative smallness of our team (3 to 6 people at any one time) and the transformative nature of our approach meant that I wore many hats. This included: strategist, service designer and scrum master.
New ways of working: Because of the size of the website and the challenges of shepherding change through the bureaucracy, I championed a shift to agile ways of working and successfully advocated for our team and some of our collaborators to receive agile training. This enabled us to deliver both incremental and iterative value to customers, staging releases and prioritising for value, effort and impact.
I also initiated a huge shift in the way content was created and published within the organisation, repositioning the Digital Customer Experience (the BAU team in which our project was embedded) as experts and strategic partners to the policy and regulatory teams. This enabled DCX to take ‘ownership’ of the design and delivery of UX, rather than acting as a service team publishing content. Rather than policy and regulatory teams owning content, we looked to them as subject matter experts (SMEs) informing accuracy and rigour.
User-centred and evidence-based design: research and analytics. Developed an evidence-based information architecture for the roads and maritime customer site, achieving a 73% success rate on validation testing, well above industry standard of 60%. Product-managed the creation of new page templates through a creative agency, building user testing and validation into the development process.
Stakeholder engagement: I initiated and implemented a stakeholder engagement strategy to connect teams across Service NSW, the centres for road and maritime safety and Transport for NSW compliance and regulatory teams to align content approaches and deliver a seamless user experience in their journey across NSW Government platforms.
Pair writing: I implemented a collaborative writing process with SMEs, embedding capability in best-practice content creation and ensuring information reflected legislative and regulatory requirements.
Content ops: I prompted procurement of a content operations platform and collaborated with our project officer to set up effective permissions, templates and workflows.
If not for Rachael, the success of the transformative program would not have reached its great heights. Her dedication to customer mindset, journeys and great networking skills allowed the team to achieve great outcomes.
Denzil Jayasinghe, Technology and Innovation, Transport for NSW
The result
Release of the first tranche of work – 140+ pages of vehicle registration content – significantly improved user experience for 5 million annual customers, and delivered on business goals for over $0.5 billion in car registration transactions.
The intuitive and user-centred approach to navigation structures and content saw a reduction on in-site search of over 30% across registration content, plus increased click-throughs to the Service NSW transactions portal by up to 800%.
Our suite of new templates achieved unanimously positive feedback in usability testing and received NSW Design System approval. Our approaches to step-by-step content were also recognised as best in class examples for wider NSW government use.
rachael quigley 