Migration overview
NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) is an independent statutory authority. It reports to an independent board and the NSW Minister for Education and Early Learning. It works with the NSW community to drive improvements in student achievement and supports the school sectors to deliver the best possible outcomes for students. NESA achieves this by setting high-quality syllabuses, assessment, teaching and school standards for all schools in NSW.
Previously, educators and other users found it challenging to locate critical information. There was an overabundance of pages and challenges with accessibility, with content difficult to find through search engines.
Migration Goals
- Navigation structure: design a coherent and intuitive structure. This supports users in finding information quickly, informing their onward journey.
- Visual representation: include relevant graphics to improve the overall readability. This creates a positive user experience.
- Content grouping: apply logical grouping. This enables users to quickly scan content and help orient them within the pages.
- Optimisation: design the user interface for accessibility and mobile devices. Ensure compatibility with assistive technologies.
Ways of working
In preparation for the migration, we established a way of working to deliver on our goals. NESA created a dedicated OneCX Program project team. This included product managers, product owners, developers, business analysts, subject matter experts and content designers. The product management method we used was Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). This broke down deliverables into, smaller, manageable parts, over 2-week increments, called ‘sprints’.
Teams participated in the following planning meetings:
- daily stand-up, to discuss the day’s focus, risks and blockers
- fortnightly sprint, to plan for the upcoming sprint of work
- weekly work-in-progress meetings, to showcase development progress, ask questions and seek clarification
- weekly content collaboration, to present content drafted for review and feedback.
A communications lead in the NESA content design team managed the roll-out of a comprehensive change communications plan. This kept NESA stakeholders informed about the project. Support was also provided by the OneCX Program change manager.
Research and understanding the customer
The NESA and OneCX Program teams worked together to understand their customers. The team conducted comprehensive user research, including interviews and surveys with 76 participants of varying ages and experience levels. Additionally, we performed a navigation test to assess how users navigate the website when assigned a specific task.
The results uncovered the website’s pain points. They produced insights, leading to improvements in readability, accessibility and information architecture.
We also used tools such as Google Analytics to understand the most popular pages and paths. We used Siteimprove to assess accessibility, search engine optimisation (SEO) and quality assurance.
Achievements and results
In total, the NESA and OneCX Program teams removed over 330 pages of outdated content. We improved the accessibility by 23.4%. The use of accessible and interactive data visualisations makes complex information more engaging. All content is now centralised, deduplicated and linked to related information.
Together, we collaboratively developed the Teacher Accreditation helper. This guides teachers, principals and employers through accreditation requirements in NSW. Designed to give precious time back for users, the helper uses a multiple-choice format known as a decision tree. It directs users through complex requirements in as little as 20 seconds. The design is Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 compliant. We achieved a 79.2% accessibility uplift on this page. Teacher accreditation content as a whole saw major improvements. Results include a quality assurance uplift of 53% and SEO increased by 74%.
From the research, we designed clearer pathways for content. This included separating Higher School Certificate (HSC) and leaving school content. This led to a reduction in users’ time to find relevant information. These pages saw a quality assurance uplift of 44% and SEO increased by 72%.
The HSC Merit Lists are high-profile webpages. The mobile-friendly list recognises students who achieved the highest possible band in their course. Users can search by student or school name, or by the course title. Past annual page views totalled 71,000. After our improvements, we saw 343,000 page views in the first 5 months of going live.
We consolidated the awards and event portals. By adding category filters and title adjustments, users can now find student and teacher events in one place.
Training and capability
We upskilled 16 NESA staff members to maintain the NESA pages by providing training. Training modules included the content management system (CMS), Google Analytics and Siteimprove. All CMS users also have access to nsw.gov.au Help Hub, which provides a plethora of online resources and a support desk to help with any issues.
The NESA website received over 32 million annual page views. The streamlined pages on nsw.gov.au now delivers to those in the education community. We’ve improved readability, accessibility and usability. We estimate a 25% increase in productivity. This gives educators more time to focus on teaching and improving outcomes.
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