What's on the SDP roadmap?

Goals

• End users can easily find the content they need without needing to understand the structure of government.
• Clients know where their content belongs, feel a sense of ownership of their content and are empowered to smoothly migrate and grow their content without feeling limited by SDP
• Clients align with the SDP vision and feel confident contributing to the vic.gov.au IA
• Eliminate duplication of content across vic.gov.au
• Improved tracking and reporting

What needs addressing

• Wayfinding can be difficult due to ineffective search, IA and navigation
• Semi-independents create silos and remove user-friendly content from the primary vic.gov.au site
• vic.gov.au by will be overwhelmed by low traffic/high volume content as SDP scales
• There is no objective way to place content, and content editors struggle to use taxonomies and tags
• VPS-focussed clients feel vic.gov.au is too citizen-centric and have trouble placing content
• The home page and main menu are considered important front doors despite receiving very little traffic
• Structural issues make vic.gov.au difficult to track using analytics, particularly journeys

The Ripple Design System has a wide-range of users, ranging from contributors (internal and external developers and designers), users (content authors and departmental stakeholders), and consumers (visitors to vic.gov.au and other SDP websites).

Since its launch in 2018, Ripple has iterated and changed to suit the changing needs of government, but without any change to its core design language or architecture. The build up of legacy design and technical debt is increasing the amount of effort needed for feature delivery, and ultimately negatively affecting the usability and accessibility of website content.

Goals

• Achieve mandated requirements for accessibility and usability of sites built with SDP
• Improve the designer and developer experience for our community (internal and suppliers)
• Set ourselves up for success with imminent projects around IA, search, brand and governance

The SDP story began in 2016, with a business case to consolidate all Department of Premier and Cabinet (DPC) websites onto a common platform. This was a successful proof of concept for a whole of Victorian government consolidation program.

Since then, we have begun to work with our colleagues across the Victorian Public Service to realize the full benefits of a whole of government approach to digital delivery.

The team are continually onboarding VPS departments onto SDP via content training, website development and website delivery.

We believe that engaging, unified search experiences will help citizens find the information they need faster and easier. Citizens experience challenges finding the information they need as amount of information is overwhelming, has inconsistent messaging & it is spread across multiple sources.

SDP is looking to review it's current search capabilities to meet the ever changing needs of the Victorian public.

We believe that having an easy to use and versatile webform offering will continue to improve the value of SDP websites for the VPS and citizens. Our current webforms offering has limitations hence it doesn’t meet all the demands of our citizen and VPS partners.

The SDP team will review our current offering and implement changes to meet the needs of our CMS users as well as Victorian citizens.