Testing and learning to make design decisions

UX and UI – what’s the difference? 

When you have a seamless experience – often without noticing – and can find all the information you need in just a few clicks, this is good UX and UI design in practice. 

UX, short for User Experience, is the process of looking at a user’s end-to-end journey, or how they get from point A to B for a product or service. In the context of nsw.gov.au, the user is our customer. Our UX designers unpack the customer’s experience by conducting research. The insights they deliver inform our teams to build experiences that ensure the customer can easily find what they’re looking for with as little effort as possible. 

UI, short for User Interface, is the look and feel of a product and is closely intertwined with UX. Our visual designers ensure all the design elements correctly reflect the brand and values of NSW Government. UI also uses research and insights into online behaviour to make interactions as easy as possible.

With nsw.gov.au we have an opportunity to redefine how government communicates with the people of NSW. Research and design is an effective way to better understand our customers’ needs and behaviours, making it easier for them to interact with us.

Redesigning the nsw.gov.au homepage

We recently updated the design of the nsw.gov.au homepage.

As part of the process we:

• reviewed customer behaviour, such as clicks and scroll behaviour, into the existing design
• designed new components that were more visually appealing and similar to what customers were used to interacting with on other digital products
• designed a new layout based on what customers needed to do with our content.

We conducted an A/B test of two design variants - one in the current format and the second designed with the new components like other consumer websites. Would our content be more engaging because it was laid out in a more familiar way?

The findings

Using Google Optimize and Google Analytics to compare how customers interacted with the page, we found page B performed slightly better. 

Here are some of the results:

• more users scrolled past 50% of homepage content
• new components increased traffic to 'featured content' and 'media releases'
• an improvement in customers clicking thumbs up, even though the same content was was surfaced on both A and B (i.e. the result is not reflective of the content featured, which could skew results).

As a result, page B is now the permanent homepage design for nsw.gov.au. The team continues to conduct research and improve the usability of the homepage as well as other areas of the site. 

For agencies coming onboard to the OneCX program, you can benefit from our research, which we share at OneCX demos and showcases, as well as work with our UX and UI designers as part of your OneCX migration.

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