Govdex Beta | Tim Hurley

What

A security-focused, self-hosted, online collaboration tool that helped agencies communicate and coordinate across government.
Used by hundreds of thousands of users for a range of purposes — predominantly file sharing, restricted communications, project management and event organisation.

Why

To rethink and rebuild the existing website and web app around user needs, with clearer usability and accessibility.

Who

Department of Finance

Working in Australian Government Information Management Office on whole-of-government Information and Communications Technology, digital services and web standards. I worked with a small web-focused team, working my way up from apprentice to Whole of Government Software as a Service tech lead.

How

Branding

The existing site had an extremely dated design with no real branding.
This meant creating a colour scheme and visual style guide from scratch for Govdex — a final style that had to convey trust and security, in a modern and simple way.

Design

Working together with business, support and development teams, we came up with a simplified set of requirements to better define Govdex's core purpose.

I started with hand-drawn sketches to consolidate the ideas, then developed high-fidelity mockups and folded later feedback into the final designs.

The styling and designs from this beta were rolled into the administration sections of the current service.

Development

Created as a set of custom themes and plugins on top of WordPress — one for each of the site's two distinct styles (public pages and the logged in, web app pages). For speed of development, we chose to use Twitter Bootstrap.

Front-end features were initially built to function as much as possible without relying on JavaScript (something some of our users did not have, and could not, enable). Later we were able to improve the UX dramatically by adding JS-based implementations on top — providing the best experience possible, regardless of whether JS was enabled.