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Project Overview
The new Victoria Legal Aid website is a huge leap forward in usability and mobile access to legal services and plain language information about the law for all people in Victoria.
Organisation
Team
Project Manager: Linley Kensitt, Victoria Legal Aid
Content Manager: Kylie Browne, Victoria Legal Aid
Infrastructure: David Emmett, Victoria Legal Aid
Technical Advisor: Daniel Bonetto, Victoria Legal Aid
Product Owner: Kieran Curtain, Victoria Legal Aid
User-centred requirements gathering and Wireframes: Briarbird
Graphic Design: Kinetic Media
Design Management: Brendan Moody, Victoria Legal Aid
Development: Reality Loop; Chandima Sirimanna, Victoria Legal Aid
Project Brief
Victoria Legal Aid's mission is to provide legal services and information to everyone across the state. The website had to get better at meeting the needs of mobile users. Rather than creating a separate mobile app or mobile site, we decided a responsive design would be the best use of our limited resources for creating and maintaining a platform for all members of the community.
Our clients do not come to our site for entertainment or to pass the time - they come to get help solving a legal problem. So the site design and content had to provide quick, simple answers. Many of our users are experiencing financial difficulties, and the last thing we want to do is drain their valuable download allowance. So the site had to be simple and efficient, while still looking great.
To support the excellent work done by our legal staff, the site had to link our clients with the right service areas for their needs and circumstances.
As well as meeting the needs of people with a legal problem, the site had to support private lawyers doing legal aid work and meet the needs of our stakeholders in the government, justice, legal assistance and social assistance sectors.
Project Need
The website prioritises access to legal information and services for people with a legal problem, while still meeting the needs of our partners and lawyers doing legal aid work. The design is fully responsive, removing the need for a separate mobile site. The innovative responsive approach creates menu items for smartphone users from the same elements that create the breadcrumbs for large-format users.
The dedicated “Find legal answers” search interface provides rapid access to vital answers for users of all devices.
The Quick summaries for each topic deliver information at different levels, ideal for both mobile users in a hurry and desktop users with the time to delve a bit deeper.
The Directory of firms doing legal aid work connects people across Victoria with a lawyer – whether one of our in-house lawyers or a private legal aid specialist practice – that meets their needs.
In all, the interface is simple, usable and elegant.
User Experience
The site manages to meet the needs of 3 distinct user groups, each with very different priority tasks. Through extensive consultation and usability testing with users, we determined the key tasks and information for each audience and gave these priority in the interface. Informed and accurate information design – from the highest level of menu options to the detailed segmentation of the content of each screen to ensure that it can be scanned rapidly – means that users can rapidly access the information they need, at an appropriate level of detail.
We undertook surveys, interviews, workshops and scenario-based usability testing with our users. We analysed our web usage statistics to determine what was important to our audience. We analysed search terms to understand what our users were looking for on our site.
We analysed our users’ mobile access scenarios to ensure that we understood what was the most important tasks and information accessed on mobile devices. The mobile-first approach to the responsive design has enabled us to create an interface that meets the needs of users whether they want to quickly check the address of our office when they are on the way to their appointment, or refresh their knowledge of the courtroom process while they are sitting in the foyer waiting for their case to be heard.
And of course, the team rigorously tested the interface on dozens of combinations of mobile device, OS, and browser environments to ensure it displays and functions as it should.
Project Marketing
A key component of the marketing strategy is to engage our clients at their point of need. The website’s Find legal answers functionality is promoted on the hold message of our phone service. Clients are thus aware that instead of holding on the phone to speak to someone, they can find rich information about the law on our website.
Our reception staff in our offices across Victoria are also strong ambassadors for our site. With the support of promotional posters in the reception area of each office, they can refer appropriate clients to the website in preparation for, or as an alterative to, meeting with one of our lawyers. A promotional walk-through video of the site is also available to support presentation to community groups across the state.
The site is also promoted through our network of partners in the Justice, Legal Assistance and Social Assistance sectors.
A Twitter and Linked-In campaign to bring people to the site for information about the law is commencing in August 2013.
Tags
Government Services
This category recognises applications developed for all levels of government services.
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