Austrade

CLIENT

Austrade (Australian Trade and Investment Commission) is the Australian government’s trade and investment promotion agency. Austrade helps Australian businesses grow by connecting them to global opportunities, providing market insights, attracting foreign investors, supporting tourism and creating jobs.

BRIEF

Strategising a web presence that supports Austrade's broad and diverse audience groups

Austrade is undertaking a period of digital transformation. As part of this transformation, Austrade is reviewing their digital footprint to connect more meaningfully with their audiences. We partnered with Austrade to help them understand the breadth of their audiences and how their web offering could better support audience needs.

Challenge

Austrade services everyone from the livestock industry to boutique winemakers as well as students looking to study in Australia, fund managers and even international buyers looking to invest in Australian goods and services. Because their audiences are so complex and varied, there were multiple sources of valuable information available across multiple sites, often with overlapping content. To address this, we collaborated to strategise a web ecosystem, and design navigational pathways that would both increase awareness of Austrade’s extensive services and guide users to the most relevant content for their specific needs.

Defining the architecture

Through a series of stakeholder interviews, user testing sessions and workshops we designed and validated a new information architecture (IA) and content structure to help Austrade’s unique audiences navigate the services and resources available. Taking an ecosystem approach, we defined how each site would have a clear role for distinct audiences, and how navigational pathways, IA, page structure and content should clearly be targeted at these distinct audiences.

Designing new pathways to content

We then also devised design patterns and mechanisms to clearly signpost audiences to the content best servicing their needs. Conduct helped Austrade embed this cohesive, ecosystem approach of thinking about how they service each of their user cohorts and establish a web strategy from a single site to multi-site ecosystem.

Outcomes

Wireframes that showcase both the idealised future state and the short-term versions of the Information Architecture (IA).
A comprehensive recommendation report that will assist Austrade in facilitating internal discussions regarding the role of the websites within the ecosystem, as well as a page-level strategy.

Austrade is now armed with recommendations that will help shape the roadmap for how to progressively and iteratively move towards a multi-site offer. The longer term goal is to help users navigate to the resources that will provide the most value.