Auckland
Transport
Designing a content strategy to streamline web content creation, and an achievable approach to execute it
Responsibilities:
Research, UX, content strategy
OVERVIEW
Auckland Transport's content team needed to establish a streamlined content strategy for web content creation. I conducted user research to help understand where in the journey the content strategy needed to prioritise.
RESEARCH
For the content strategy to prioritise key areas of the website, I conducted stakeholder, business and user research to uncover the key user journeys and where content can support them
My key responsibilities:
- Stakeholder workshops across the AT client team and wider organisation to gain business knowledge
- GA analytics review to identify key website pages and pathways
- Audience definition workshops
- Customer interviews to understand how they use the Auckland Transport website and where content can support their usability
Other responsibilities:
- Co-ran stakeholder workshops to uncover the current state of their content creation process
- Supported workshops to help define business and team values to build the content strategy
- Ran a dynamic value model workshop
- Designed a roadmap to implement the content strategy
FINDINGS
Through the research I was able to identify how users expected to receive instructional information and be supported to complete a task, ultimately allowing them to self- serve.
Research findings
- Users struggled to find key information
- Key information was presented too late in the journey
- Poor page structure means key information is missed
- Inconsistent language causes confusion
- Users lack trust in the information
- Key information isn't centralised
How they informed the content strategy
- Implement a clear heading structure
- Design priority pages
- Highlight key information and reduce other content
- Separate task based and information based content
- Consistent terminology
- Provide information that enables informed choices
Poorly written and structured content decreased the trust that users’ have with Auckland Transport. This trust being broken before users even began their tasks caused frustration and impacted usability.
OUTPUTS
Auckland Transport team needed a plan to implement the content strategy, and so we co-designed a road map plan.
After the content strategy was written, the client needed a plan to implement it. I designed a road map through several roadmapping workshops to build the roadmap and give the client team a tangible plan to implement the content strategy. These were collaborative workshops with the client team so they could influence the tasks and have a sense of ownership.
Research findings
- What does the approach to socialise the strategy through the organisation and get stakeholder buy-in look like?
- What needs to happen first to step up the structure for implementing the strategy?
- How are we going to break up those steps into achievable tasks?
- How do we balance BAU tasks?
- What will require new learning and upskilling?
- Who needs to be involved?
I designed a comprehensive road map that broke down the tasks that the content team needed to achieve to implement the road map, and the collaborative approach that we took to designing it allowed the roadmap to contain actionable and achievable tasks that the content team were well prepared for.