PSBA
Breadcrumb Digital was engaged by the Public Safety Business Agency (PSBA) to redevelop the Business Services Division’s section of their SharePoint 2013 intranet.
The project was the precursor to the redevelopment of the rest of the intranet as well as a migration to SharePoint Online.
The client
The PSBA was established in 2014 to provide high quality corporate services to Queensland’s public safety agencies (Queensland Policy Service, Queensland Fire and Emergency Services, and Office of the Inspector-General Emergency Management).
The challenge
A key focus for this project was to improve the usability and findability of content while working with the requirements for the solution to:
- fit within the wider PSBA intranet
- avoid custom development that would create a maintenance overhead
- not impact the upgrade path to SharePoint Online.
The skills
Breadcrumb Digital’s customer experience lead and user experience consultant were the primary resources on the project, delivering a range of content workshops, creating and validating an information architecture, and developing wireframes that were consistent with the approach of the wider intranet while improving the user experience.
Breadcrumb’s SharePoint developers implemented these outputs and created detailed publishing instructions and ‘as built’ documentation to enable PSBA’s web team to maintain the solution beyond the end of the project.
Jennifer Linde
Yulia Kornienko
Kristen Willis
Paul Murphy
Walter Leong
The approach
The outputs of the project were predicated on getting a good understanding of user and stakeholder needs. A group interview with the Business Service Division executive leadership team set expectations for the project, while interviews with staff from the Queensland Police Service and Queensland Fire and Emergency Services helped identify what content was useful and where content was missing.
A working group made up of content owners from each of the areas of Business Services Division (finance, fleet, procurement and property) also attended a series of workshops to create a unified vision for what the project should achieve as well as to gain an understanding of what makes good content. Findings from the interviews were shared with the working group so they could develop or adjust their content as needed.
A new site map was developed using card sorting and then validated with tree testing. Wireframes were developed that considered:
- user demand and organisational needs identified during workshops, and user and stakeholder interviews
- the requirement for the layout of the pages to fit within the overall design of the PSBA intranet
- using out-of-the-box (OOTB) solutions available in SharePoint.
The outcome
A redeveloped Business Services Division section was launched and smoothly migrated to Office 365 in November 2018.
Key improvements included:
- a new information architecture to reflect how agency staff group and find information
- reviewed and improved content, including new pages to reflect gaps identified from user interviews and an emphasis on functions rather than organisational units
- contact details on every page to enable users to get help from the right people
- accordion functionality to improve scan-ability on longer pages
- visual quick links to funnel users into key content.