Located on the traditional lands of the Kaurna people, on the inner fringe of the City of Adelaide, the City of Unley (CoU) is widely recognised for its natural environment. It’s one of three of Australia’s United Nations designated “Tree Cities of the World”. Predominately residential, this inner metropolitan city undertook journey of digital transformation. After years of dealing with outdated and ageing infrastructure, with help of OpenCities, CoU has become recognised for its strategic use of digital technologies to enhance lifestyle of residents, better manage environment and local economy support. User research became a powerful ingredient in their transformation journey.
City of Unley
Designing for community needs: user-centric research digitally transforms the City of Unley
Overview
Digital transformation of government seeks to continuously improve delivery and optimise council services and better allocate resources. Launching Digital Unley, CoU embarked on its first steps toward this journey. But Council didn’t want just a business-first approach. Co-design became central.
Situation
Results
While technology was a driver, customer needs were essential to the Council’s transformation.
“I think user research is extremely powerful for three reasons. One is because it gives you priority and direction. It’s useful in helping you plan because it empowers you to have conversations with your staff when you are changing things. Once you've got that customer data and research behind you, it makes that conversation possible. And three, we involved our staff in conversations with our customers and help to build a really strong sense of empathy and understanding about where the customers were coming from.”
“Business-centric systems are great at doing customer service online. But we selected OpenCities and Open CMS so that we could build those very customisable or expressive types of online services that were very user centric. And then we integrated them with our corporate systems. So, we could get the best of both worlds.”
“It was a cultural change in the organisation, and it had the benefit of allowing people to really take ownership of their online presence and their online service delivery, as well as skilling up our staff to be more digitally literate.”
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84%
94%
reduction in paper forms lodged (60k annual printings savings)
Metrics
Success Story
OpenCities
overall customer satisfaction
A platform tailor made to meet community needs
Solution
“We were very business focused in terms of asking everyone in the organisation, what they want us to do to transform the organisation digitally. And we realised that wasn't very effective. So, we went out to the community and asked them what were the things that they thought were important and workshopped with them.”
– James Roberts, CoU’s Manager Business Systems & Solutions
Co-design outperforms business-first approach
CoU sought a product that aligned with community feedback and was designed to meet community needs. “Once we painted that picture of what it was our community expected from us, we had a very good map.”
52%
reduction in postage costs (90k annual postage savings)
reduction in printing costs
76%
“When we went to market, we looked at a few different options and what really struck us about the OpenCities product was it was tailor made for what we were trying to find. Those modules that existed in the product aligned with what our community had asked us to provide to them,” says Roberts.
“The OpenCities product was unique compared to the competitors in that they provide you with a platform and all the resources that you need to embed it into your business and upskill your staff in implementing it and managing it. Whereas competitors that we looked at were very much, ‘here's our product. We'll build it for you and hand it over to you.’”
“It's not just about buying a website. It's about shifting how you use these tools and kind of empowering the Council themselves. And that was something we wanted.”
“I think sometimes some organisations approach digital transformation with the goal of being more efficient and saving money. Our strategy was always to improve our customer services and empower our staff and enable people to deliver better service outcomes.”
“We designed a people-centred design framework, which was really about getting out there and learning, understanding, listening and engaging, and pretty much defining the problem we were trying to solve rather than designing a solution to a problem that may not exist,”
User research was essential to the transformation, involving workshops with young people as well as older adult communities. “We wanted to really understand what our community expected from us around our online presence and our online services. In retrospect, it was a substantial and significant piece of research that took us eight months just to complete.”
What are the services that our community want to be able to use on our website and access, or what are the types of information they want to find? How do they want to discover that information? Whether it's through a map or through a lookup or an interactive widget. We used that to build a set of functional requirements.”
“That worked really well for us because what we're trying to do is increase the digital maturity of our organisation,” says Roberts.
Digital maturity was key to the CoU strategy, resulting in increase in staff maintaining their digital presence and customer services. “That was an outcome we wanted. So, it worked perfectly, it was great for us, but it's a big push to make that happen.”
While technology was a driver, customer needs were essential to the Council’s transformation.
“I think user research is extremely powerful for three reasons. One is because it gives you priority and direction. It’s useful in helping you plan because it empowers you to have conversations with your staff when you are changing things. Once you've got that customer data and research behind you, it makes that conversation possible. And three, we involved our staff in conversations with our customers and help to build a really strong sense of empathy and understanding about where the customers were coming from.”
“Business-centric systems are great at doing customer service online. But we selected OpenCities and Open CMS so that we could build those very customisable or expressive types of online services that were very user centric. And then we integrated them with our corporate systems. So, we could get the best of both worlds.”
“It was a cultural change in the organisation, and it had the benefit of allowing people to really take ownership of their online presence and their online service delivery, as well as skilling up our staff to be more digitally literate.”
Empowering staff hand-in-hand with organisational digital maturity
Since launching their digital front door, CoU have integrated OpenCities products as part of their digital transformation. This has resulted in significant costs savings in moving online. “There's cost savings, which are also an indicator of just how much our organisation has changed in terms of becoming much less reliant on paper and post.”
But cost savings weren’t the end point of the digital transformation. The cultural change in the organisation lead to the empowerment of staff to deliver service outcomes.
Customers finding information they need 50% faster with 99% success rate
Website visitor numbers up 30% compared to previous website
reduction in printing costs
52%
The majority of the community preferred to engage digitally in there own time.
Customers finding information they need 50% faster with 99% success rate
“I think sometimes some organisations approach digital transformation with the goal of being more efficient and saving money. Our strategy was always to improve our customer services and empower our staff and enable people to deliver better service outcomes.”