Project Overview
Geoscience Australia (GA) is responsible for Australia’s earth science and data, offering vast resources for scientists, business, and citizens. But their resources have been hard to access, understand and use. A new design system changes that - giving GA a stronger voice and unlocking the potential of Australia’s earth science and data.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
John Broadfoot, Jason DSouza, Jonathan Puc, Karen Gallagher, Kat Denton, Liviana Baldion, Lucas Mounsey, Ryan Ashworth, Tait Ischia, Whitney Colbourn
Project Brief
Geoscience Australia is a federal agency responsible for Australia’s earth and climate science. They offer vast resources, for everything from the data that powers Google Maps to charting sea level rise. But these resources have been hard to find, understand, and use.
Today undertook a program of design research with government stakeholders, scientists, educators, and citizens to understand how people wanted and needed to access and use GA’s resources. We co-created a digital strategy to inform the design and build of a component-based design system that gives GA all the ingredients they need to deliver consistently great digital experiences.
Project Need
The design solution required us to develop a brand strategy and digital strategy to give Geoscience Australia a stronger voice and tools to make resources consistently great and easy to access, understand, and use.
Crucially, they needed a design system - a toolkit of robust, pre-composed and pre-tested digital design and code. We made a modular system of components that had best-practice UX baked in, that integrated with older IT systems, and met high accessibility standards.
We piloted the design system by bringing together components to build a complete website for Digital Earth Australia https://www.dea.ga.gov.au/
This project enables the ongoing democratisation of Australia’s climate and earth science and data. We’ve made it easier for scientists, businesses, and citizens to get to Geoscience Australia resources, understand how to use the data, and get on with the projects they’re invested in to make new and wonderful things.
It’s also a sensible use of public money: Instead of reinventing the wheel for each new digital project, they now have a practical toolkit to piece together high quality experiences themselves.
User Experience
The design was driven by user insights gathered from 35x 1:1 interviews over four rounds. We engaged a broad group of current and potential representative users of Geoscience data—their industries were a mix of tech, agriculture and government and their task requirements spanned across tech innovators, decision-makers, and advisors (amongst others).
Our design system enables Geoscience Australia to present their depth of technical earth data to the public in an accessible and transparent way. dea.ga.gov.au is the first of many experiences that can be rolled out with our flexible design systems, offering simplicity, accessibility, ease-of-use, and the ability to get started with their data.
The user experience design and UI design challenge here is unique: Modular components must be designed and coded so they can be combined in any sequence and still result in an elegant, user-friendly digital experience.
This requires great design, but also requires great code, great technical documentation, and great documentation of the brand and digital strategy. The detail here is exhaustive (and unglamorous), but absolutely necessary to ensure that non-expert designers can understand the design intent of GA’s digital work, and also the technical process to bring a new experience to life.
Our work here ensures that anyone can understand why new experiences need to exist, gets them in the right mindset (user-focussed, making the science understandable and the data accessible), and guides them through a process to make useful and coherent experiences.
Project Marketing
Quality scientific data provides a big opportunity for Australia and Australians. It can help institutions, academia, industry and the general public to inform decision making, model the future, and solve some of society's biggest challenges. The organisation now has a clear and achievable way to get there.
There is enormous value and impact by opening up this data to individuals, enterprise, businesses, organisations let alone the impact on climate change and our ability to adapt.
Democratising the data that Geoscience Australia holds is imperative to ensure equal access and opportunity for all and fully fulfils their role as a public service pioneering science for the benefit of every Australian.
The project was showcased by Department of Treasury as best practice innovation for Gov CMS, with the headless architecture and Storybook being key factors for what government sees as leading technology and experience delivery.
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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