WAIRC website redesign
An empathetic website redesign.
Creating an empathetic and simplified experience for those impacted by workplace legal disputes with Western Australia’s Industrial Relations Commission.
Client: West Australian Industrial Relations Commission (WAIRC)
Skillset: UX lead, IA, content architecture and mapping, workshop facilitation, user testing
The project at a glance.
WAIRC is a tribunal established through legislation that functions independently from the government. Its key role is to deal with claims made by unions, employees and employers about employment issues; ranging from unfair dismissal through to pay disputes. Due to the nature of its business it is critical that WAIRC comes across as professional across all its touch points. However with a website that hadn’t seen a revamp in years, WAIRC was concerned that it was failing to provide the best service to members of the public and the practitioners that relied on the website day to day.
The approach.
Due to the nature of WAIRC’s business it was critical to begin the design process through in-depth staff interviews and frontline observations of contact with customers to develop an understanding of services that were on offer.
Keys stages:
User workshops with frontline staff, union workers, lawyers and customer surrogates to identify pains, gains and tasks
Website personas to articulate the different audiences that engage with the website and their needs
User flows & wireframes to visualise the rearchitected website experience
Content mapping workshop to coach the digital team on how to complete a content audit based on the new website structure
The solution, in a bit more detail.
A key insight from the user and surrogate workshops was the polar opposite needs of the websites two key users; the fastidious practitioners and the uninitiated applicants.
The new website experience would need to cater to both groups one with esoteric knowledge on the legal system and a group who would most likely be in emotional turmoil and feeling overwhelmed.
The revised website experience focused on designing smoother journeys for the two key audience groups.
For Practitioners:
1) allow users to dive into case research and detail easily with quick-task-based-links and a database style search
2) facilitate the detailed case research process for practitioners with database-style search featuring customisable filters and the ability to ‘pin’ content into a case file
For Applicants:
Support applicants with a natural language form that reveals claim types and open menu style quick links to aid in findability of content
Empathetically guide overwhelmed applicants with plain speaking, step-by-step content that breaks down complex information into easy digestible chunks that can be actioned
