About City of Stirling
With a thriving population fast approaching 220,000 and a total land area of over 100km², the City of Stirling is one of Western Australia's major local government councils. They provide a wide range of over 200 services, activities and programs to their community.
They strive to empower their community with information on living, visiting, working, and investing efficiently in the City of Stirling.
The challenge
Based on feedback from stakeholders, the old City of Stirling website was difficult to navigate, wasn’t responsive on all devices, information and documents were difficult to locate or understand, and the design was outdated.
Their community needed to have the opportunity to bring matters of concern to the City’s attention. The old website did not have the functionality to enable the community to submit petitions online.
Accessibility was another challenge as the old website did not provide any language support for members of their diverse community who have English as a second language. This meant that these customers were disadvantaged from accessing basic information about the City’s services via the website.
The solution
For the City of Stirling, we used a combination of user research, prototyping and user testing.
User Research
The City of Stirling conducted some research by interviewing a user group. They presented their findings to us, and we used this information to build the initial site. Post site-launch, our team conducted some A/B testing to make further improvements from there.
Prototyping and User Testing
We created a sitewide prototype and provided it to users to test, making note of where and why they hit roadblocks. To get reliable data and the best UX results, the magic number for user testing is actually only five users. Any more than that and you’ll just be finding the same issues over and over again. The test users provided us with the feedback that we needed to develop and tweak the site into what it was at launch.
Web Development
After extensive research and user testing, we built the site which features a bunch of customised modules in order to solve the initial challenge that The City initially set us.
Our work didn't stop there.
Since the launch of the new website, we have worked with the City of Stirling in a Growth-Driven Design (GDD) approach. This means we are working collaboratively to make continuous improvements to their site, leveraging user data to influence new features and functionality.
The City of Stirling is currently on our customer support package, which gives our team a monthly bucket of hours to work on these new features for them to ensure their site is constantly evolving to meet the needs of the stakeholders and the community.
We have outlined some of the most-loved features below.
Advanced Search Functionality
The City of Stirling website features one of the industry's most advanced search functionality modules. From the home page, visitors can search for both pages and documents, making finding information an easy process. The module includes predictive search functionality to create a simpler search process for the user.
A-Z Waste Guide Module
Councils are under ongoing pressure to do their part in being green, so the City of Stirling wanted to ensure it was as easy as possible for their community to do their part. With the introduction of the three-bin system, the City was inundated with phone and email enquiries asking how to divide their waste.
We created the A-Z waste guide to provide residents with a convenient and self-serviced way of knowing how to dispose of their waste correctly. users can search for any item, and the module presents information on which bin the item should be placed into, whether the item is eligible for the Containers for Change initiative, or if the item should be taken to the local recycling centre.
With waste disposal guides constantly evolving in Australia, it was important for the module to be dynamic, providing the team with the flexibility to update alongside changing regulations. The Stirling team have the ability to add new items as requested by the community or edit existing items if disposal requirements have changed.
The module has seen a great level of engagement, with visitors spending an average of 2:41 on the page (stats from 1st June - 1st December 2021).
Shaping our City Module
Every Local Government has an engagement module where they encourage residents to submit feedback on upcoming projects. Most would use third-party software, which has its limitations in terms of form build and reporting functionality.
We built a module in Kentico where residents can participate in open community consultants online. The module allows for notifications nd updates to be sent straight to the inbox of those who would like to follow the project's movements.
Leisure Centre Timetable
The leisure centre area of the site presented some complexities, in that we needed to create a comprehensive, yet user-friendly fitness timetable that captured classes across multiple locations.
The City use a third-party application to manage the backend of class bookings across all centres. Our team was able to pull this information through to the website and then apply a filter to separate classes based on location. The result is a simple to navigate timetable for each leisure centre, that integrates with the third-party booking system.
The results
