AGENCY: Pikselin, 2016
ROLE: Discovery, IA, Design
Who is the Ministry of Defence?
The 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. Shown here is the previous version of the site. It contained walls of text, and only a single image. It did not reflect their brand, and the content structure wasn’t doing them any favours. I took the wonderful brand guidelines they had created for their offline use, and translated them digitally to bring the website to life so it could give users the true story of what they really do.
Brand alignment, clear content categorisation, visual impact and heaps less text
I worked with MoD to hold the discovery workshops for the users and stakeholders. They truly all wanted to enhance the visuals and make the experience engaging for their audience. Two main areas of focus for the site were to make it 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. It now makes a visual impact the text is web friendly, and the site is a much better reflection of who they are and can fully tell their story.
Discovery, design & build. An end to end scenario
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.
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.
A capability 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.
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.