Public spending watchdog the National Audit Office (NAO) has overhauled its website and made its content more accessible for parliamentarians and other public sector employees.
“Our discovery research showed that audiences found the previous website hard to read and struggled to find content that was relevant, it also wasn’t clear to visitors what the NAO offered,” said Dan Gluckman, senior digital communications manager at the NAO.
Additionally, some parts of the website were not fully accessible and didn’t work well on mobile devices.
As part of its five-year strategy, the NAO committed to redeveloping the website, to improve public accountability, provide more accessible independent insight and make more impact on outcomes and value for money.
“A core part of our current strategy is making more effective use of technology, data and knowledge to create and communicate our insights. The project to redevelop our website was part of delivering on this strategy,” said Gluckman.
Making content easier to find and read
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The website had grown organically over the years and site navigation, technical architecture and development had become inconsistent and no longer met the standards expected. This impacted the way users could search for and discover different categories of content like the insights and overviews sections.
With the site holding thousands of historic records and reports, it was important that the newly designed website would allow parliamentarians and other public sector employees to easily search, find and identify what they needed. The new solution needed to fix the pain points for different audiences and lay the foundation for a secure, scalable and sustainable website.
Working with dxw on the project, the organisation identified the need for improvements to how content is organised and located, and to ensure the appearance is consistent across each page.
“Looking at the best examples of other public sector websites, it was clear that the NAO website needed an improved design system to make the content easier to find and read,” said Gluckman. “This included design components to improve the search function and site navigation, as well as improving the technical architecture and development and hosting model.
“The website rebuild has significantly improved the browsing experience for users accessing content, with the functionality optimised for mobile devices. As the old website was made up of a number of multi sites, the new development has brought all of these under one single site, simplifying the design and making the ongoing maintenance process more efficient.”
