In an earlier blog post, about our new shopfront for the DTA, we detailed the way we used the Service Design and Delivery process to release the beta version of the site.

Since the release of the beta site in April 2018, we’ve been conducting user research to refine our site and to make it easier for you to use. We’ve also been working with the Digital Service Standard assessment team to ensure we have met best-practice principles for designing and delivering our website. 

What’s new

We’ve made changes to the content and structure of our website, based on the insights we gathered from usability testing.

As an example, we discovered that some of our users were looking to the DTA to describe how to make government services simpler, clearer and faster. So we created a section called Help and advice. 

We’ve also brought together the platforms we deliver, including the Digital Marketplace, Digital identity and cloud.gov.au under Projects. Combining these products into a central location simplified the navigation and tells you what we're working on. 

Now that the website is live, we’ll keep testing and improving. If our users tell us that they want to access information from us differently, we’ll iterate.

Technology we used

One of the biggest decisions when redeveloping a website is selecting a CMS. As part of our redevelopment process we chose Drupal 8, building on the work done by the GovCMS team.

We’ve used the Design System to make sure we met usability and accessibility standards and to help deliver a consistent experience for users. We built accessibility in from the beginning, and once we had a beta site, we tested the accessibility of the site.

We use the DTA’s cloud to host our website. Hosting in the cloud means we do not have to  manage server infrastructure and gives us the ability to run development, test and production environments for other projects. It also allows our service to to scale quickly and adapt to change.

A new website does not mean that our work here is done, we will continue to refine, iterate and learn as we go.

To all of the users that provided feedback and our great team of developers, service designers and user researchers thank you for all of your hard work and input.

If you have feedback on the DTA website, email us at info@digital.gov.au