National Office for Child Safety

An optimized information architecture, a refreshed contemporary design, and improved resource management were all delivered in record time to prepare the site for a national awareness raising and behavioural campaign, and to support the wider work of the National Office for Child Safety (NOCS).

Overview

Drupal 10 | GovCMS Convivial | Information architecture | Design | Service directory | Search

The National Office for Child Safety (NOCS) was established in response to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and its website is part of the Attorney General’s Department sites that Morpht manage.

NOCS leads the development and implementation of national priorities to protect children and young people from child sexual abuse, and support victims and survivors.

NOCS engaged Morpht to uplift the site’s visual design, user experience, information architecture and the usability of the site search, resource library and support service directory. 

Morpht implemented a fresh and contemporary new design for the NOCS' website in time for the launch of its national campaign 'One Talk at a Time', and to support NOCS’ diverse stakeholders to be able to access information and resources. We improved the information architecture based on insights from user testing. We also reviewed and delivered enhancements to the resource library, support services, site search and new safety features including a ‘Quick exit’ button.

Visit the site

NOCS website screenshots
Splash Award winner 2023

Best in Show and Government - Federal

Splash Awards 2024 Winner
Splash Awards runner up

Design & User Experience

Splash Awards 2024 Runner up
Australian Web Awards Finalist 2024

Community & Culture, Government and Drupal

Australian Web Awards 2024 Finalists

The challenge

NOCS had a tight deadline. With a new national campaign One Talk at a Time launching in 3 weeks, Morpht had to re-design and implement the new look and feel of the site as well as improve the IA structure and conduct user testing.

The solution

The Child Safety site was built on the GovCMS platform using the Australian Government design system and Convivial. To fast track the design uplift and improvements, Morpht leveraged the capabilities, tools and structure of Convivial to its advantage, using a variety of components and modifiers. This helped us deliver a re-design and refresh of the site five days before the campaign launch.

AGD NOCS site on devices

Improved IA and user testing

The Child Safety website is rich in useful information and resources that needed to be updated and extended with new content to support the national campaign and NOCS’ broader work. This required us to review and improve the information architecture and test it with first-hand users.  We rejigged the sitemap and conducted Tree Testing to validate the new structure and identify any weak spots to address. This research was only made possible by defining ‘top tasks’ for the various audience groups. We supported the improved information architecture and reduced friction in the user flows by implementing a megamenu and reworking page layouts. 

AGD NOCS treejack testing

Design uplift

Envision a design that's modern, vibrant, and refreshingly non-corporate – that was our brief. Despite commencing the project with limited access to campaign assets, we focused on the brand colours and design elements to craft a coherent aesthetic that added depth and movement to page layouts and helped tell a story and inform the audience with impact.  

AGD NOCS site on tablet

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Parallax Components image

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Search

Morpht improved the quality of the site search by implementing Solr search and adding boosting on key content types such as pages and resources. We also added a ‘key phrases’ field so the client could add keywords to help boost the search results for their desired outcomes for key information and resources.

AGD NOCS site search

Services directory

The service directory was a static list of third-party providers that wasn’t easy to use or extendable. Morpht defined a content model for a ‘Service’ content type with defined fields to help type, group and expose to the user the different features of each service. We enabled a faceted-search experience that supports the user in searching for and filtering results by location, service type and specialist services provided. 

AGD NOCS services directory

Resource library

The resource library boasts more than 220 resources. The search experience muddled different types of filters which potentially created some confusion for the users. To improve the user experience of filtering through the resources, we created a new topic field and redefined the resource type. We also included a keyword search on the resource library to help users search by specific keywords.

AGD NOCS resources

The outcome

In the short timeframe, Morpht were able to deliver all project requirements and uplift the Child Safety site in preparation for the campaign launch. In the three weeks following the launch of the campaign, the website had over 120,000 views which was an increase of 745%!

NOCS now can create different page layouts, using their branding assets in background modifiers and promoting content using the components. The improvements to the site search, resources library and services directory have also improved the way in which users find the information they are looking for that is relevant to their needs. 

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