Using design research to empower economic independence of First Nations people through the IBA website

Our research plan was designed, comprising methods to collect qualitative and quantitative data, to explore solutions on how Indigenous Business Australia could best meet its goals of providing:

• a go-to resource for any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person interested in IBA’s products and services
• a seamless customer experience for those looking to apply for a home loan, business loans or support, or investment advice or support
• a rich experience with useful tools, information and resources on how to purchase a home, start, grow or buy a business, or invest or seek investment opportunities
• a place of inspiration and to help celebrate and promote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, culture and the valuable contribution our First Nations people have on the Australian economy.

Our business analyst sat down with six Indigenous Business Australia staff members to discuss the ways in which the organisation uses technology currently, as well as the objectives and intentions of its other digital initiatives. They also conducted an audit of the website’s WordPress back-end, looking at how it uses pages, posts, forms, plugins, settings, themes and templates.

Our content strategist pulled out and cleaned Google Analytics data for around 5,000 pages, looking at the content performance of each section of the website and the most popular individual pages, as well as the top website search terms, in order to identify any clues as to where visitors were getting lost or confused.

The researchers from NGNY and Portable worked with Indigenous Business Australia to identify the key groups of website users and stakeholders, and set about planning and organising interviews that would explore their motivations, needs and stress points. We conducted 32 in-depth interviews, with business customers, home loan customers, customer service staff, Executives, and Indigenous organisations that have a partner relationship with Indigenous Business Australia and who use its website.

Personas can be used as decision-making tools to help anyone who needs to make decisions about the website now or in the future, to understand and empathise with the people who use the website. Based on our in-depth interviews, six personas were crafted.

The personas were written in terms of thinking styles: the guiding principles, reactions and reasoning that people have and use. In addition, an element of behavioural and contextual information to bring them to life was also incorporated . They were written without reference to demographics, like gender and age, to avoid shortcuts in thinking, like assumptions and subconscious stereotypes.

To undertake the information architecture aspect of the project and deliver a new sitemap – a key deliverable we were delivering as part of the digital strategy, was the need to figure out how we could make the content that people need from the website easier to navigate and find. 

To articulate and align expectations for the information architecture work, we ran a strategy workshop with seven staff members at Indigenous Business Australia that challenged participants to empathise with visitors to the website, prioritise goals, define success and consider best and worst-case scenarios.

Building on the outputs of the strategy workshop, we ran a card sorting workshop with eight  website users: potential customers and Indigenous people with little or no pre-existing familiarity with Indigenous Business Australia's website. We wanted to find out what approaches to organising content on the website made most sense to people who use the website (or might use it). 

We hoped they would share their own mental models for the relationships between content – that is, how they naturally organise and label it. The card sorting workshop resulted in ideas for structuring content on the website that we could synthesise and test.

We conducted online tree testing with 88 participants. Tree testing is a type of usability testing that measures how findable the content on a website is. We used an online, unmoderated approach, which gave us quantitative data. 

We ran one round of testing against the sitemap of the existing website to identify usability issues – findability, specifically – while also providing a baseline against which we could compare against our revised sitemap. Running the same test with another sample of participants against the revised sitemap gave us evidence to validate (or not) that our proposed changes would improve findability of content.

We provided recommendations that together comprise a vision for a future-state website that is more welcoming, easier to use, informative and helpful to customers. This included recommendations covering information architecture, tools and services, content, the homepage, visual design, and technology.

All the recommendations were based on the user research and the combined experience and knowledge of best practice within the team. 

The blueprint showed all recommendations on 1 diagram. It’s a vision of a future state in which the website is welcoming, informative, empowering and easy to use. This blueprint complemented the contents of our final report by bringing the insights and recommendations to life visually.

The artefact gives a high-level view of how the recommendations come together and connect holistically into a future experience. It also gives decision-makers an easy reference point for how individual recommendations fall into various aspects for the website, and how future decisions can be anchored in the user-centric themes that have emerged from our research.

BETTER FUTURE (previously known as DRIVENxDESIGN) have awarded Portable Gold in the category of 'Better Future - Economic Growth' at the 2023 Australian Design Awards. This category recognises "projects that expand and grow the economy through additive methods rather than extraction, encompassing circular economy, environmental. equity and community values.”

We are delighted that our work in facilitating user-centred design has been recognised in this way and we'd like to thank all of those involved in the project and setting it up for success. We hope that this helps promote the systemic need for co-designing services with those who have lived experience to ensure that new developments both align with the expectations and successfully offers services which meet the needs of those seeking much-needed support.