Originally, the WestConnex website was created to communicate the construction of a variety of roadways in order to alleviate congestion and allow for Sydney's growth.
Since then, many of the projects have been completed and WestConnex has transformed into both a series of construction projects and a network of functioning motorways.
With the completion of the M8 in its sights, WestConnex was keen to update their website to effectively communicate both types of messaging to a broader spectrum of users.
As the lead UX and UI designer on this project, I was excited at this challenge. Firstly, I immersed myself in the existing website I audited all of the content from this legacy site, which had grown to an impressive +160 unique URLs and over 10,000 documents stored. I also interrogated the existing site's Google Analytics data, which helped me understand what types of information were popular and where people tended to drop off.
I then assessed the existing personas and reworked them to suit the changing nature of both the WestConnex project and the website. Getting into the mindset of each of these personas helped me reorganise, restructure and at times, archive the information into a much more succinct, compact and useful site and page structure.
Next, I facilitated both internal and stakeholder IA workshops, with the aim of making it easier for our primary and secondary users to locate the key information they would need. Throughout the project, the IA morphed and evolved as more stakeholders became involved with the project, all with their own team goals. It was quite the challenge but user testing results suggested that we were still able to create an architecture that was logical and put the users first.
WestConnex wanted to be respectful for the diverse communities that live in Sydney by including some information in languages other than English that are commonly used along the WestConnex corridor. I researched Census data in order to provide key demographic insights to inform which languages we included on the site, and also to help understand their CALD audience.
Finally, after iterations of wireframes, designs and even a map tool prototype, the new WestConnex website went live in time for the M8 launch.
With its refreshed design and simpler navigation I'm confident that users are now able to find out all the information they need for their journey and see the location of current construction in their area.
