Waikato Business News October/November 2022

User experience experts helped Hamilton
City Council understand its audience.
Hamilton City Council
asked Company-X to
help design the user
experience (UX) for new and
upgraded content.
As part of a larger city-wide
update of the Hamilton City
council website, Company-X
was asked to help design the user
experience (UX) for new and
upgraded content supporting its
Growth Funding and Analytics
unit.
There was a lot of
‘what if’ and ‘how
can we’ during the
work with Luke
and Cory
“We looked for help putting
ourselves in the shoes of our
users,” said Unit Manager Greg
Carstens. This included understanding
what outputs and information
would be most impactful
to each user group, specifically
relating to growth data, economic
analytics, and economic
development.
The Council wanted to ensure
that the user experience was
optimised for a unique audience
that was both internal and external
to the organisation.
Carstens and his leadership
team needed a solution that provided
data to elected members
and senior staff, but also helped
to educate a diverse collection of
external partners about Hamilton’s
economic performance and
investment opportunities.
Most importantly, the team
wanted to ensure that datadriven
insights, trends, and
projections could be shared to
support increasingly complex
decisions.
Company-X software architect
and senior developer Luke
McGregor and senior user interface
(UI) and user experience
(UX) developer Cory McKenzie
held several workshops with the
Council’s Growth Funding and
Analytics leaders to understand
the aims and objectives of the
website. Their previous experience
on other heavily UX-reliant
projects benefitted the council.
“There was a lot of ‘what if’
and ‘how can we’ during the
work with Luke and Cory. It was
genuinely like a greenfield project,
starting from the bottom and
building up,” Carstens said.
McGregor and McKenzie
developed eight personas for
WAIKATO BUSINESS NEWS, OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2022 5
Users first approach drives great user experience
whom they would design the
website user experience for. The
personas included an elected
member, managing director,
management accountant, planning
consultant, two property
developers and a senior Government
official. This exercise
helped understand the types
of goals and challenges of each
user.
“The idea was we had one
persona per each different category
of people the council
thought were going to go use the
site,” McGregor said.
“They have significant
amounts of data and analytics
within their systems, and they
wanted to ensure that it was
available and accessible to the
public. A key goal was to provide
ways to highlight insights
that are linked back to core data,
all with different elements that
would be useful to each persona.”
“Based on those personas,
we created a high-level journey
map that provided insights into
what pages would be on the site,”
McKenzie said.
“What are the individual elements
throughout the site, and
what supports the distinct ways
that each persona might interact
with them?”
The research led to the creation
of a user experience design
with McKenzie creating conceptual
designs for the council’s web
team to build.
Not every persona was
included in the end design, some
EXPERIENCED - Cory McKenzie, left, and Luke McGregor
were encouraged to use the website
as a contact point to request
the data they needed.
“The attributes that you
want to resonate with the internal
audience were night and day
different from the external audience,”
Carstens said. “But from
the start, we knew we didn’t
want a site that split users into
two distinct groups with Path A
and Path B. We wanted it to be
one integrated site because an
external audience quickly shares
a lot of the needs of an internal
audience.”
Another important goal was
to quickly educate users who
might initially come to the site
with an outdated or uninformed
view of Hamilton’s economy.
Council Economic Development
Manager Mike Bennett said
“once users learn who our largest
employers are, we want to make
it easy for them to dig deeper and
understand which key sectors
are behind our growth. It’s also
important to show how Hamilton
is part of a region that is
economically diverse but highly
integrated. The challenge is to
use complex data to generate
useful insights, and then deliver
it in an authentic and engaging
way.”
Company-X’s work also
provided the Growth Funding
and Analytics team with clarity
around customer prioritisation
and the power of search. “There
was a recognition of how important
it is to ensure high-volume
users can quickly get what they
know they need, while new users
can seek out something they
might not even initially realise is
there,” said Carstens. “Cory and
the team really helped us understand
how powerful search is. If
done well, it can transform an
average site into a critical tool.”
Hamilton City council’s
Growth Funding and Analytics
team gained a deeper understanding
of how to balance the
relationship between data and
information and address the
needs of a diverse set of users in
a web-based environment.
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