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