Showcasing their many capabilities and strengths
- Client: Ministry of Defence
- Date: November 2016
- Roles: Discovery, Design, Front & Back-end Build
- Product suite: Silverstripe
Who is the Ministry of Defence?
Ministry of Defence (MoD) is New Zealand Government's Defence Agency whose purpose is to give civilian advice on defence matters to enhance the security and interests of New Zealand and its people. Their public website is the key communication channel between them and their audience groups and it needed to reflect the Agency's work in the defence sector, to make is accessible and easy to get understand.
Brand alignment, clear content categorisation, visual impact and waaaay less text
We worked with MoD on their public website redesign project to enhance the visual and content experience for their audience. One of the key outcomes was making the site accessible to its audience who would typically avoid using the site. Two main areas of focus for the site was to make the site visually aligned to their brand while providing essential information quickly. We did this by providing clear content categorisation in tandem with modern navigation mechanisms across the site and within internal pages. As it needed to make a visual impact and less text-heavy, we translated their brand to be reflected in a much more visual and interesting manner.
The key success factors
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Discovery to design process
This enabled us to understand the use and needs of the users and agency alike – navigation and content. Thus, the design decisions made were appropriate to the real needs of the audience.
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The searchable document library
We provided the functional capability for the users to find information in a contextual and meaningful way e.g. a searchable document library for white papers published by MoD that allowed content publishers to publish content once and appear in multiple contexts on the site.
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A capabilities showcase
We created a way for their audiences to better understand their many capabilities by building a public facing showcase page for each of the projects. This also supports the organisation's desire to be as transparent as possible.
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Google driven deployment mapping
Using tools in alignment with Google maps. They can now show not only where their deployments are, but the type of deployment, and any other necessary details including location photography.
Getting to know the real MOD
By working in constant collaboration with their team, we were able to achieve the goal of creating a site that showed who they REALLY were as an organisation in a way that leaves their users wanting to know more.