Improving your For government experience

You’ll soon be able to navigate more seamlessly through the For government website. We’re refreshing the homepage and making changes to where content is located. This will make it quicker and easier for you to find the information you need to do your work.

What's changing?

We’re removing the homepage’s thumbnails and links. Instead, you’ll see the top level of For government’s information architecture (IA) with clear wording describing what information you can access beneath each heading. Click on the heading and navigate through to the content you need.

We’re also editing, reducing, and relocating a large amount of content. We’re retitling the ‘Working in the public service’ section to ‘Employment, policy, career and wellbeing’. We’ve reviewed and refocussed the content in this section to help you understand what’s expected of you, your entitlements, and the support available to help you develop your career and take care of your wellbeing.

We’ve moved the rest of the Public Service Commission’s (PSC)’s content that used to live under ‘Working in the public service’ to the ‘Human Resources’ section. We’ve reviewed and refocussed this content to help managers and Human resource (HR) specialists support their teams and agencies. This allows us to blend it with Queensland Shared Services’ (QSS)’s HR operational content.

When are we making these changes?

Thursday, 10 February 2022.

Why are we making these changes?

In 2021, we completed a research piece with the PSC, our largest publisher on For government, to evaluate and address some known issues. We’d noticed an increase in PSC content (489 pages up from 243 pages), information about similar topics spreading across different sections of the IA, and a disconnect between PSC’s help content and QSS’s operational content (our second largest publisher).

What research did we complete?

We completed an initial baseline usability test of the existing IA. We asked participants to complete 10 tasks that required them to navigate to pages in the IA. 81 participants completed the test with an overall success rate of 45%.

We conducted a workshop with the PSC’s Communications and Engagement team to review the results and discuss ways to improve the content. We completed more testing, asking participants to complete an open card sorting exercise.

The open card sorting exercise helped us understand the PSC’s audience and how they categorise content. We worked with the Communication and Engagement team to develop a new IA based on this research. We then tested it.

We observed 10 participants who completed the same 10 tasks as our baseline test and an additional 5 tasks to help us validate some of our decisions. Participants achieved a 51% success rate for the same 10 tasks. Our observations gave us good insight into what we’d got right and what we hadn’t. We made further refinements and tested again.

Our second round of testing achieved a 64.5% success rate. More importantly, we observed that participants completed each task 23% faster than the initial baseline test and found the task 28% easier (less mistakes made getting to the right page).

Read our PSC IA project report for more about our approach and analysis.

What did the research tell us?

Our research helped us understand that users expected some of PSC’s content to live under ‘Human Resources’ in the IA. It also told us that the PSC’s content was hard to navigate due to its:

• volume
• repeated information
• similar page titles
• unfocused messaging.

This gave us a mandate not only to create a leaner IA, but also to consolidate and revise the content we’re keeping. Over the last 5 months, we’ve consolidated, revised and reworked the PSC content that we’re keeping on For government. We’ve re-written it using web-writing best practice, ensuring a clear purpose for each page with a strong customer-focus. We’ve also worked with the PSC’s Communication and Engagement team to improve the PSC’s web-writing capabilities. Frequent web writers and business unit representatives have completed specialist web-writing training to support the content review and ensure better, customer-focussed content for the future.

What’s next

We’ll continue to make adjustments to the For government structure to enhance your user experience. If you have any suggestions, email us at qsscxdesign@chde.qld.gov.au. Thank you to all the participants that provided feedback on the existing and new IA during the customer research phase of this project. And thank you to the PSC for your willingness and eagerness to improve the content you publish for the Queensland Government.