Project Overview
The Greater Sydney Commission is leading metropolitan planning with a bold vision to reshape Greater Sydney as a metropolis of three cities. Following extensive community engagement, the Commission recently launched final strategic plans for the region and its districts. Knowing these plans will form Greater Sydney’s blueprint for next 40 years, providing enhanced accessibility for community engagement was extremely important.
The current digital climate of strategic planning in NSW is dense and confusing. The mission was to create a digital web tool, My Greater Sydney, to play a pivotal role in communicating how the plans will improve the productivity, sustainability and liveability of the city.
Early on, user interviews revealed that search and filter functionality was crucial to meeting the needs of the online audience. My Greater Sydney is the first strategic city plan in Australia to be launched digitally, that allows users to interact, search, download and filter the content.
Organisation
Team
Greater Sydney Commission, Digital Team
Adelphi Digital Consulting Group
Project Brief
Adelphi Digital was given a brief to publish A Metropolis of Three Cities - the Greater Sydney Region Plan, and its district plans. However, the Greater Sydney Commission wanted more than simply a series of PDFs. In addition to a bright, modern design, they wanted to put Sydneysiders’ needs front and centre.
The goal was set to produce a digital tool to help stakeholders and the community explore region and district planning across Greater Sydney. The project needed to deliver a user-friendly experience and an immersive, customer-centric interface. All design elements increase interactivity and encourage exploration of Greater Sydney’s visionary strategic planning.
The project placed a high priority on the tool being completely responsive to mobile devices, and compliant to WCAG AA 2.0 standards.
Project Need
Greater Sydney is Australia’s economic powerhouse, and it’s growing fast. Communicating the Commission’s vision for A Metropolis of Three Cities is integral to helping manage the city’s growth and enhancing its status as one of the most liveable global cities.
When the Greater Sydney Commission released its six draft plans for exhibition, published as PDF downloads and accompanying website landing pages, the website content gained 73% more engagement than the PDF versions. This encouraged the Commission to digitally enhance the content, and publish the final plans as fully interactive HTML webpages.
The design had to sympathetically bring together elements of the existing website, the PDF versions of the plans and the newly updated GSC style guide, while also establishing its own brand identity.
User Experience
Superior user experience was the key focus for the My Greater Sydney website. Adelphi’s expertise in interaction design allowed the commission to craft an effortless user journey, starting with a detailed discovery phase. The project commenced with a series of internal workshops, interviews with key stakeholders and website users to develop a suite of comprehensive audience personas. This research helped to develop a functional prototype, used for a series of of moderated in-person user tests, further validating and refining our audiences’ motivations and behaviours. Having gained a deep understanding of the various needs and a list of data-driven recommendations, Adelphi set to work enhancing the interactivity of the wealth of information contained in the six plans.
One thing was clear, the users wanted to search and filter the plans. A functional game-changer for strategic planning in Australia. As well as being beautiful, My Greater Sydney had to be functional. The centrepiece of My Greater Sydney’s design is the revolutionary ‘explore panel’. Available on every page of the tool, the explore panel quickly allows users to navigate to any topic within any region or district. Navigation dynamite!
The analytics revealed the site had a high number of repeat visitors, often completing the same user journey each time. How could we engage these returning visitors and streamline their journey? The design included a favourites widget and increased cross promotional content to encourage exploration throughout the site.
Project Marketing
My Greater Sydney, launched in May 2018, was heavily promoted across all the Commission’s digital communication channels. The tool featured on the website’s home page, and the community newsletter.
As well as liaising directly with key planning stakeholders across local council districts, the Commission will be informing Sydneysiders about the tool through its social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and Instagram.
Project Privacy
My Greater Sydney is a free tool, accessible by anyone with an internet connection.
The Greater Sydney Commission welcomes feedback on the tool to help drive future improvements.
The Commission does not collect any personal data through the My Greater Sydney tool. The inputs users put into the app are saved locally on their devices.
Digital - Government Services
The provision of timely government services has been transformed as applications and sites are developed and implemented to either replace or complement previous methods. Be it the delivery of current and up to date critical information, compliance, community support and engagement, notification and registration or providing greater accessibility to government resources.
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