Empowering the Victorian community to contribute their ideas and opinions on a range of government policies and programs.
Powered by District Engage, the Engage Victoria digital platform gives Victorian citizens the opportunity to engage with the state government on a range of government projects and policies.
With more than 1 million users per year, Engage Victoria uses surveys, polls and forums to enable Victorians to contribute their ideas and opinions on issues that affect them, helping to shape better policy and project outcomes.
Workflows
For Digital Victoria, a key driver of the pivot to our community engagement platform District Engage, was the ability to customise our SaaS platform to improve the experience for website administrators. The development sprints were shaped by Digital Victoria’s business requirements and acceptance criteria, and we tested the workflow improvements on our SUS testing environment.
Admin experience
With 1200+ administrators, it was critical to improve their user experience. We held extensive co-design sessions with key stakeholders on administration workflow, interface terminology and reporting. New features such as customised export schema to XLS and CSV formats were developed, which improved reporting on engagement consultations and feedback for both internal and external Engage Victoria users.
Migration
Over 50GB of data was moved across from the previous platform in a complex migration process. We simplified the underlying database structure and untangled complex project data relationships. We reduced the number of data tables by a factor of 20.
We carefully crafted migration scripts over a series of sprints, to enable continuous data updates, while regression testing on each migration ensured data integrity and performance gains were maintained.
Over 15 million records were moved to the new platform. These included thousands of projects, admin accounts and historical submission consultation data. The simplified database structure means easier data maintenance, quicker data integrations and faster performance.
Collaborative workshops with key stakeholders to improve user experience for all government department administrators
Apply Victorian Government Design System (Ripple) to platform frontend to ensure consistency with Victorian Government digital ecosystem
Best-practice security protocols applied across all environments and admin functionality
Simplified data structure for easy data maintenance and future migrations
Simple, consistent presentation of information and participation tools to ensure usability for public
Improved workflow for website administrators reduces the burden on the core team for engagement consultation approvals
Using a modern in-app overlay interface enables improved documentation delivery
With a backlog of features planned for the Engage Victoria platform, District is now in the continuous improvement phase. We’ll continue to work with Digital Victoria to assess and implement feature requests from engagement managers.
By modernising the way public consultations are conducted, Engage Victoria has made it easier for administrators to manage consultations while facilitating stronger engagement in public projects and policy. Ultimately, Engage Victoria is creating a better connected community, and helping to improve outcomes for all Victorians.
