Reimagining the online presence of Australia’s global policing agency.
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Introduction
The Australian Federal Police (AFP) is Australia’s national policing agency, tasked with protecting Australians and Australian national interest.
The AFP website serves as an important tool to inform Australians on matters of national security, detailing policing services and how to effectively engage with the agency.
Key Goals
In 2023, Doghouse Agency was appointed to rebuild and redesign the website.
Using District CMS, our Drupal SaaS product that’s designed for government agencies, we’ve built a wholly custom site that reflects and re-energises the AFP brand, while dramatically improving the user experience and site performance.
Challenges & Solutions
One of the big challenges for the new website was integrating the AFP’s separate career and corporate websites into a single streamlined website.
To explore options, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the existing website and mapped user behaviour, to identify navigational blocks and pain points.
This fed into a comprehensive assessment of the use of taxonomies across the website. The organisational structure of the AFP is highly complex, with a unique jurisdiction in policing crime types like fraud and corruption, drug-related offences and crime against children.
Understanding the taxonomy of the organisation required a meticulous approach.
The new taxonomy presents content in a more organised and interconnected way, improving navigation and the user experience. They were workshopped and validated with the AFP’s team, and later tested as part of the redesign of the Information Architecture (IA).
Redefining the IA
Turning our attention to the IA, we held a series of UX workshops with the AFP’s team to align the functionality of the website with the needs of users. Meanwhile, our technical teams explored how to integrate the website with separate jobs listings and career website through an API service.
Our work on taxonomies provided a breakthrough here.
Thanks to the new definitions of personnel roles, we were able to integrate job listings with associated crime types, such as fraud, counter terrorism, or drug crimes. This would allow potential recruits to be seamlessly directed via the website to AFP’s recruitment portal.
Improving the User Experience
To explore how to improve the user experience, while at the same time promoting recruitment and storytelling on the website, our UX team conducted a series of design methodology exercises. By mapping out user journeys, we discovered that weaving storytelling and recruitment elements seamlessly throughout the entire website would be far more effective than isolating them in separate sections.
Guided by our earlier work, this approach has created a seamless user journey. We designed several different content structures and layouts for creating, managing and displaying a broad range of content types, including crime types, recruitment and news stories.
Wireframes were created, tested, and refined before implementation.
The Implementation
Thanks to the strength of the out-of-the-box features of District CMS, including search, workflows, components and content types, the development phase was accelerated.
The main challenge of the project was merging the separate jobs website with the main website, and integrating it with the recruitment platform. We achieved this with a custom integration between the website and the recruitment platform, that pulls in jobs from the recruitment platform and displays them on the website.
Another custom integration was built for the content migration. The content audit and production were managed by True North Content using the Gather Content platform. Our integration seamlessly mapped this content and migrated it to the new website.
Doghouse also created a bespoke design that included colour palettes, fonts, style components and design elements. Together, these improvements to the CMS have simplified and streamlined workflows for administrators, while improving navigation and the user experience.
Security measures were implemented at every stage, with comprehensive audits ensuring compliance with Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) guidelines.
News, podcasts and vibrant storytelling combine to showcase the important work of the agency.
The vibrant new AFP website has improved its user engagement rate by well over 200%.
Recruitment is promoted throughout the website, with improved user experience making it easy for the public to find and connect with AFP services.
The new site meets WCAG 2.2 standards and includes assistive technologies for enhanced accessibility and readability for all users.
