Crown Lands
Designing intuitive information architecture
We used research-backed insight to build an intuitive information architecture and improve the user experience of the Crown Lands website.
As a department, Crown Lands is responsible for 42% of the state of NSW including parks, reserves, roads and cemeteries. Crown Lands asked Focus Creative to identify and improve critical user pain points in their existing website before it was due to be migrated to a new visual design system.
Crown lands was a legacy website that had been added to adhoc over time and much of the content was outdated. With a fixed launch date and time pressures, redesigning all of the content wasn’t possible so we focussed on the most impactful outcomes.
We implemented a five phase approach:
Discovery and user research.
User personas and needs analysis
Draft of a top level information architecture and iterative testing
Design prototyping and user testing
Migration plan with digital agency
Over multiple interviews and a deep dive into existing analytics we distilled our users into four main archetypes. Our research showed that our varied user needs with Crown Lands was heavily influenced by the maturity of their relationship with Crown Lands as a department.
One of the most critical pain points for users interacting with the department was understanding whether they needed a lease, licence, enclosure permit or road purchase and how to successfully put through an application. Not to mention transferring, mortgaging, subleasing, surrendering, altering and terminating pre-existing licences and leases.
We mapped and tested this decision matrix closely with Subject Matter Experts and redesigned the entirety of the content around this user journey. What was a clunky journey forcing users to click through dozens of pages of deep links before contacting the department; the new Licences, Leases and Purchases section follows a faceted search approach guiding users to self select which criteria suits them best before providing them options to apply or manage.
