As part of a team of students and graduates working at Open Lab, we redesigned the Govt.nz website’s appearance and made changes to the information architecture.
Existing feedback and data from the site suggested:
- it didn’t look like a government site, so people were not convinced that it was legitimate
- it was visually unappealing
- it lacked a distinctly ‘New Zealand’ feel.
When testing the prototypes at a community computing hub, we had our first experience of testing with people with a range of digital and reading abilities. We were struck by the difficulty the website presented to some users and made changes as a result. This awareness of how differently other people experience websites from myself has been with me ever since.
Read more about this in my blog post Govt.nz Design Overhaul
Meg Douglas Howie 