‘Your website sucks!’ A human approach to legislation

The Parliament of Victoria debates more than 100 Bills over a year. These result in legislative changes, with a record of all activity stored on the public Victorian legislation website. These records are then used as a source of truth in court cases, articles and policy development.

So, when our team began the redesign of the legislation website using the Single Digital Presence platform, it wasn’t something we took on lightly. From the outset, there were 3 big factors we knew we needed to focus on:

It was old. The site had launched in 2003, and it looked it. No mobile support, no ability to link directly to specific records, and decades of quick-fixes and workarounds applied to match the changing processes of Parliament.

It was complicated. The interlocking logic of parliamentary rules and processes can seem arcane to an outsider (and even to many insiders). When you’re dealing with 11,000 records spanning almost 200 years, building a consistent approach to them all is tough.

It was important. Law makers and practitioners both rely on the website to verify what legislation was in force at a particular moment. This meant that making content easy to find and read was paramount. Unfortunately, this wasn’t always the case, as some user feedback can attest:

Unprompted feedback is invaluable, even if it’s sometimes hard to hear.

This shows how important it was for us to get the site right. And helping us to get it right was our human-centered design (HCD) process.

A primer on the HCD process

Human-centered design is a problem solving process that starts with the people you are designing for. This is in comparison to a ‘traditional’ design process, where a team of experts assemble to build a ‘thing’, presenting that ‘thing’ back to the users.

The problem with the above is that you are working from a lot of assumptions and guess work. Decisions are guided by the preferences and biases of the people working on the ‘thing’.

This is the important part: you don’t know if ‘the thing’ works until you’ve launched it. This is bad news if you’ve spent 8 months on something that doesn’t address your end-user’s material concerns.

For the Legislation website, our process boiled down to the following:

An expanded ‘double diamond’ design process developed specifically for the Victorian Government.

• Align: Understand the outcomes and metrics for success.
• Discover: A period of learning. Talk to the people that use the site to find out what they want, and understand what problems we may need to address.
• Define: Analyse our research and reflect on our discoveries. Identify the problems we need to address, that the SDP platform can’t already solve.
• Develop: Rapid prototyping of ideas and concepts, then testing them with our users.
• Deliver: Build our most promising solutions into the platform.

Let’s dive a little more into what we did and what we found in the Discover, Define and Develop stages.

Understanding the who, the what, and the why

One of the best ways to understand what people want is also the most straightforward: by having a chat.

We conducted workshops and face-to-face interviews with the people who use the website regularly or have insight into what it needs to do. This included:

• stakeholders and administrators (Office of Chief Parliamentary Counsel, and Parliamentary staff)
• people we knew used the site from within Government (Policy officers and lawyers)
• people from the general public (lawyers, journalists, and librarians)
• other types of people that came up when we were talking to the above groups (Judge’s associates, City councillors, university professors and their students)

The information gathered from this research was invaluable.

The audience of the Victorian Legislation website.

It told us that the most repeated users of the site were those involved in shaping policy within the public service. They formed the core audience. Private lawyers, journalists, councillors and students rounded out the rest of our target audience.

It also gave us critical insight into what they use the site for. These purposes fell into two groups:

• theory: which covers writing articles about laws, preparing advice for MPs or the public, and creating new legislation; and
• application: covering legal prosecution and defence, as well as public access for personal cases

Lastly, it gave us many problem areas that we would need to address. From basic expected functionality being missing, through to legislation being difficult to find and read, these pain points gave us a roadmap of obstacles we needed to overcome in our solution.

Designing solutions

Now that we had a solid understanding of who used the site, what they needed the site to do, and why were they facing the problems they were, we could move into the solution space: designing how the new site could solve these problems.

We wanted to bring users into the design process as early as possible, and for us that meant something called lean prototyping. This meant building low-fidelity (read: they look rubbish) solutions, then working them into interactive prototypes that we could test with users as early as possible. This is the best way to validate some of our assumptions as quickly as we can.

For testing with the lawyers who access public legislation, we created clickable online wireframes that — while crudely put together — still resemble how the finished product will work. This allowed us to verify that people understood how the information was presented, and also confirmed how they would naturally try to navigate and read content.

Clickable online prototypes.

However, when it came to the interface for the legislation creation and editing process, there was a lot we didn’t know. We needed something that we could quickly iterate with based on live input from Parliamentary staff.

We needed paper prototyping.

Sometimes the simplest techniques are the best.

Even cruder than our clickable wireframes, paper prototypes allowed us to collaboratively move elements around, change their names and add new features, just by using a pen and direct feedback from our collaborators. It broke our users (and us) out of the digital space, bringing a greater focus to the content itself.

This allowed us to quickly confirm that we got terminology right, let us try new options on the fly, and verify that our proposed interface matched up with how legislation is created in the real-world environment of Parliament.

Making it look and feel great

After a series of design iterations, our prototypes were ready for their final treatment: visual design. As well as making the site look great and feel good to use, we also needed to make sure any styling was cohesive with the rest of Single Digital Presence and vic.gov.au.

Looking good, feeling good.

Wrapping up

So, what did the human-centred design process give us? For starters, we’ve launched the site with:

• The ability to search the entire legislation library at once
• A modern, mobile-friendly interface
• Easy-to-read templates for all legislation types
• Best practice for accessibility

Beyond that, rather than building a product based on guesswork and what we hoped would work, the process brought stakeholders and users directly into the design process, allowing us to use their knowledge and experience to deliver a product that we knew would deliver meaningful outcomes to Victorians.

Early feedback has been positive, but check out the new Victorian Legislation site for yourself. We’d love to hear what you think!

Duncan is a researcher and designer working on Single Digital Presence, a web platform to make Victorian Government information easier to access and use.