 So we're going to get right into it. My name is Emma Cameron. Apparently I'm on one of the programs about six times. This is the actual presentation that I'm giving. I'm not doing the other ones. So we're going to be not using the clicker. All right, so we're going to be talking about governance and in big projects, what we've learned from our prototypes during our time and what we did after go live, which is often where websites tend to die. So I work for the single digital presence project, which is a Victorian government project. Now the project was actually funded for one department, the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and to consolidate 38 websites. And what happened was everyone got really excited, and other departments started sort of jumping on at the same time, and our Executive Director is not a no man. So we had to juggle all of that with not really a sort of significantly expanded sort of budget or team. So this is what it used to look like before. You can see it's all over the place. It's a very special sort of old Victoria Police site down the bottom, which is pretty special. And we're changing because it's just, it's hard for Victorians if everything's different. And it's hard for public servants as well. It means we're not secure, we're not accessible, things aren't getting updated. It's hard to learn how to use them. So this is what it's looking like now. You can see there's much more consistency. You can start to see sort of, yeah, those consistent design elements. This is a photo of me in grade one. Now I've been told I probably didn't have to circulate. I'm still the tall girl with the big fringe, nothing much has changed. Still read a lot. I was the kid that got signed up for the piano lessons when everyone else was playing, you know, netball and football and basketball. So not much has changed. Now this down the corner, that's my friend Barb. We've known each other since we were three. We're very different people. She's a tiny kid in the bottom row. She was playing sport all the time. She left school when she was 16. She wasn't super academic. And just by chance, she ended up retraining as a family violence support officer at the same time that I was doing this project. And one of the areas that we have content in is actually for family violence support officers and for the family violence reform that the Victorian government's doing. And that for me was a really important touch point. She's doing this really hard job where she's, you know, supporting people through this really traumatic time of their life. And, you know, our content was complicated. It used words like tranche. It, you know, it wasn't sort of being used by the people it needed to be used for. So that was, you know, having an actual person when things got hard was really, I think, is what got a lot of the project team through the project. So this is our high level website classification tool. You can see from the big yellow dot that our strategy was really around feeding as much as we could into our main Victorian government website, Vic.gov.au. There are some sites where we needed an extra level of independence, things like commissioners where they're supposed to be a bit separate from government. We have the same content repository for these what we call semi-independent sites, but they have a still a kind of look and feel of a different website. And then we have fully independent websites, things like Victoria Police, the governor's website, where it's separate. We actually, what we're finding is we've got too many independent sites at the moment and too many separate content repositories because we had sort of a lot of departments opting in, so we're actually looking to consolidate even more over time. So our first website was the governor's website. Now, what worked well when we ran that was we used hotjar to get some surveys, to get some insights into who was coming to the site and why they were coming. We used a technique called pair writing. Can I just show of hands? People have heard of that. Yeah, great. So it's similar to pair coding. You sit people down together and you make sure they're collaborating. And just anything you wear you can collaborate is going to, it's going to, you're going to get better outcomes. And it was really important for us that we transition skills over. A lot of the people we were dealing with who were content owners, they looked after a website as part of like six other things that they were doing. So we really wanted to pass on skills. The next time we did it, we made sure we had content approver sessions because often where things go down, go wrong is that people say, oh yeah, it'll be fine. And then the person who has to sign everything off says, why have you changed this? I don't understand. Make it go back to the way it was before. So we really wish we were careful to brief the right people. And that made the process much, much smoother in future. Photos, we learned a lot about photos as well. It's photos are a big deal and they're actually hard to get. I think a good photos across the board. So if you're not making sure that your areas you have for photos are really kind of flexible and will work for, you know, for most types of photos, then, you know, the website's going to be hard to use. So the next big phase was our prototype, our alpha.vic.gov.au. It was the first time I had a prototype of an alpha and a beta running live. We had a sample of content in our sort of equality area, like women's equality, veterans, LGBTIQ, and what we call our journeys across government to help people navigate across government. And then our beta we brought in our grants information. I thought we were going to get lots of user insights from running an alpha. You can see from the graph, unsurprisingly, there's a lot of public servants and digital professionals giving us information to use for. We want to hear from them, but what we found was when we flicked live, we got just this whole set of different data. So, but what it was really good for was for managing stakeholders to have something to go, this is what you're going to get, this is what it looks like. You can click around on it and see it. That helps so much. And we were running this project with a core content team of three people. So, we wouldn't have been able to like have that many websites sort of migrating across if we hadn't been sort of moving things across, you know, like piece by piece. So, having the prototype was great for that. Navigation, we've changed significantly. When we first sent live, we had that kind of blocky look and feel. Now, we've got sort of two different sets of navigation. We've got one where we've got a sort of card scenario where we feature just sort of really important items. And we've got a navigation on the right hand side. You can see from the heat map that people interact really well with that. And our second form is again what we call a journey, which really steps people out in terms of actually what they have to do step by step in the real world. So, and that we're getting really good feedback on both of those approaches. Our taxonomy, how we're kind of connecting information together has been really important in terms of making sure our content types like news and events and grants can be dynamically displayed on a page to move away from sort of having to sort of manually go through and add like an event on different pages. What we find if things are too separate, people don't find them. But if it's manual, then it takes us too much time to keep adding them to pages. So, having that kind of dynamic feature is really useful through tagging. We also have these little, they look like buttons. You can click through and you can sort of see all the information that's tagged to the one topic. No one's really using those. So, that's an experiment that sort of didn't work so well. Around this time, Department of Treasury and Finance opted into the platform. And one of their sort of major websites is their procurement website. And that's, as you can imagine, very complex, very detailed. It hadn't been touched for a really long time. They were really adamant that it needed to be done by the end of financial year, which gave us less than two months to work on the project. We brought in a vendor to help us to do that. But what we found was we didn't have that kind of with our department. We had our governance model signed off by our secretary, which is like the highest level of the department. And we did a big road show with executives. And we sort of briefed everyone really thoroughly. We still had problems, but it just meant we had less problems. What happened with a new department was we started talking about how we wanted to change things and make things more user-centric. And people got really worried about things like plain English and just making changes in general. And the timelines were really tight. And it caused a lot of tension. And you can see from the graph when we went live, we've got a Was This Page Helpful feature on every page. And we weren't getting great feedback. But we didn't give up. We sort of collaborated with DTF and we were like, what do we need to do to kind of keep moving? And we did do some really intensive training. And that really one of our more vocal stakeholders actually emailed the trainer afterwards and said, I'm really sorry I gave you a hard time. I understand now what you were trying to do. And things like focusing on accessibility and migrating over some of the extra content with an extra resource to just keep chipping away at making the content better. And that department's content owners are really attending our community of practice now and are much more engaged and happy. So our kind of final things that we did with our key features in our main site, we moved our corporate website fully into our Vic.gov.au. That actually gave us an increase of 85% extra traffic by bringing it in. No one really wants to go to a corporate website. They can be quite dry, but we actually had some useful interesting information on there that was buried. So by bringing it into our main site, we really bubbled that up. We created a publications template. There's a lot of publications in government. They're usually PDFs. It means you can't look at them properly on your mobile. It's not good for accessibility. It's not good for, I'm sure you all know the reasons. So having an actual template to help people has been great. We had our annual report H2ML first for the first time this year. We've got about 20 publications in that template. It's still a changed journey, but we're starting to see real progress. We did some specific features for Aboriginal Victorians as well because we have that responsible for that content. We've got an alert to notify people if there's an image of someone who's passed away. And we've also made the acknowledgement of country more prominent at the request of Aboriginal Victorians. So workflow. Obviously a lot of authors, this is my one and only meme because my product manager said you've got to have a meme in there. So it actually is a lot like that and we really took that into account with workflow. The reality is that you've got one person who's logged into the system. They have to send it to their manager. Their manager says it to their manager. There's about 20 stakeholders. They need to have a look at it. Sometimes the minister's office gets involved. They need to see it. So the preview was really important to us. We set that up to be sort of to be easy to access. You don't have to be logged in and trained for five days to use the preview. It's got a little alert. So you know it's a draft because before we had that, people freaked out a lot that they were looking at something that was live that wasn't supposed to be. And outside of that we've got alerts that come through for our team so that we know when jobs are coming through because we're a publishing gateway for people. And that's integrated with JIRA. So we're all here because we think community is important and that's been really important to us as well. And I think one of the key things that some helped our project to be successful is that we're connecting people up with each other. We're sharing the research that we do and also how other people are using the site. And that's really kind of helping people to feel like they're supported, which is everyone wants that, don't they, at the end of the day. So we've also, since we've gone live, we've been responding to needs. There's been a lot of different authorities and agencies that have gone live since the project. Normally those would be separate sites. They're now housed on our main Vic.gov.au site. And you can see they're slightly different but they've all got that same look and feel. And again, they're much more discoverable on the main platform. And again, they're small teams, they're panicking because they're about to go live with a new authority really quickly. And they've got our team there to help them through a journey of digital. Campaigns are another really common thing in government. Sometimes they have advertising attached, sometimes they don't. They're the most popular content that we have currently. Again, these are within the Vic.gov.au website now. The ones that are working really well. Unsurprisingly, they have a really strong call to action and they have a communication strategy attached to them. Even some of the graduates programs are less flash looking one but that resulted in, it was about a 185% increase in applications by putting this kind of campaign together. So it really got results for the people who did it. How we've been keeping quality, there was this page helpful. I just, I can't understate enough how useful that is. It's a really simple example of how we use that feedback to make improvements. We look after the information about Victorian flowers and all the weird Victorian things that we have. And apparently there's also a tartan, which we didn't even know until this piece of feedback came through. So that's now information that we host on the site. We've got Google Analytics dashboard set up now so that people can access their information about how they're tracking. And we have our, actually people like our analytics experts and our service design experts come to our community practice. So people have specific questions they can connect with the experts and get support and help. And again, having that model where people can talk a little bit more one-on-one and it's less kind of presenting at people, that's been working really well for the community. And we do things like accessibility audits and SEO audits to really highlight to people what's working and what's not working. So that's, yeah, it's, people are juggling a lot of things in government. I think, and Victorian government at the moment is been very active. So, yeah, it's a case of understanding that people are juggling multiple jobs and supporting them. So where, what are we looking at next? We just launched some online training on our content management system because we would take a lot of our time was being taken up with doing basic training on the CMS. And then often people would just show up and they'd watch us do things and then they'd go away and they would forget because they weren't doing it themselves. So this is forcing them to actually log in, create a page and watch the videos. That's very, it's, we've only just put that page up. So it's very new. So it's very experimental. But we hope, but the plan is that that gives a, frees us up more to do more sort of training and mentoring in the kind of higher level digital stiggles, like how do you write a content strategy and how do you become a good product manager, those sorts of things. We're really focusing on those journeys that I talked about earlier of how do you step people through like real life, they're, you know, help them through their real life and connect them with the government services that are available. Because that's generally the feedback we get is, ah, that's really useful. I didn't really know about that. So how do, how can we bubble up the support that's available for people in a way that makes sense for them? A big focus for our next 12 months is going to be our back end. As always, when you're doing a project and you're scrambling, you focus on your front end user and you give them lots of love. And we, didn't give quite as much love to our content authors as we always wanted to. But with the time constraints, there's definitely some improvements that we want to make to our back end admin. We're also looking at collaborative governance or one of our developers was like, ah, you're open sourcing your governance. But what we want to do is we're moving from like our department being the department that looks after Vic.gov.au to really saying this is the website for everyone. How can we work together and make sure that the website is useful for everyone? And we're using everyone's expertise as well because there's, you know, there's strong web teams in every department and we know that there's things that we can learn from them as well as things that they can learn from us. So, yeah, to sum up, the good old sum up, the governance and the rules are important, but also like talking to people and being really human is important as well. The comms and the training is like, again, it's just, it's just really, really important. The more lean you can be, the better. I mean, it's obvious, but that we overcooked it with the navigation and now we're sort of looking at how we can simplify. And the more you can consolidate, the better your better results you're going to get. And keep sharing what works and what doesn't. And the more evidence you have, the better people do like evidence and listen to evidence. Not always, but it gets you wins much more than kind of not having anything to talk about. This is just a little list of some detailed resources where we're pretty open source with a lot of our stuff. So it's a lot of the detail of how we did things as publicly available. So this all gets shared around no doubts. And yeah, corrupt for questions. I'd love to know what the team makeup was for with a project this big was. Yeah. At the moment, we have 20 people, I'm looking at my project manager, team makeup, as in the number of people or the actual roles. Yeah. So there's, yeah. So we've got one UX designer, one visual designer. How many developers are we at now? Six. And three people in the content team, communications manager, scrum master, project manager, tech lead. We've got, yeah, we've got one person on support. Yeah. It's very, it's very lean. And yeah, and a QA, yeah, two people on QA one part time. Yeah. Thanks very much for that. It's an excellent presentation and well done. I've got so many questions, but I'll just ask one. I think correct me if I'm wrong, but you said that your main site and your semi-independence sites share a common content database. Is that right? How do you manage that? And do people have sort of access to certain areas of it? And yeah, how does that work? At the moment, it's open. We're looking at making it less open because it does make things more difficult if we've got sensitive content. So we're in the middle of a piece of work to make sure that people only see the content that's relevant to them. Yeah. So, yeah, more on the development side of things, but we have worked with various government sites at Queensland particularly. And I just kind of always wondered, because it's kind of interesting to see the other side of it. We kind of do a lot of development in UX and UI and interface and everything, but then from what actually happens from the government point of view, and there's probably like a plethora of questions I could ask. But just one in particular, I kind of always wondered like, was this page helpful kind of feature? Just like kind of what some of the experiences or kind of the process of workflow of what happens when someone submits what actually happens. I've actually never, from being a developer, heard anything. I assume that's all internal, but I'm just always curious about kind of what goes on when the feature is used. Yeah. Our process, obviously everyone's got different processes. Someone will check it on a semi-regular basis, but we have a formal process of a full review every month. We go through, we look at what's actionable, and we connect with the content authors if we need to around what changes we can make. We also track it every month, so we look at how sites are performing against each other. And yeah, and use it as a bit of a benchmark. I mean, it's obviously, it's a really rough tool because you're getting feedback about the policy, like the content itself. People love a public holiday. If you're giving them money, they love it, but it does give you a bit of a framework for easier website, you know, hitting the mark or not. Yeah. Thank you.