The Department of Health’s separate ‘sub-sites’ needed replacing with an integrated and comprehensive site structure and navigation to provide easy discovery of information.

We developed a new information architecture model that is robust, connected and integrated with consistent design and clear user paths.

The Department of Health has long struggled with the maintenance of 186 separate ‘sub-sites’ in the health.vic.gov.au domain. In this environment, users have faced significant issues in interacting with the Department online. The homepage functions as a portal-like layer – an index to the 186 ‘satellite’ websites and applications, rather than an integrated structure to house disparate content. The result of this is that there is no comprehensive site structure and navigation and few meaningful connections to related content making it very difficult to discover information.

The results of the research activities undertaken have clearly defined a new information architecture model for the Department which is robust, connected and integrated with consistent design and clear user paths.

Our ‘No wrong door’ model allows:

• Content to be discoverable through topics, programs and audiences
• Collections of like content displayed, searched and browsed as central repositories
• Integration of current ‘sub-sites’, into a single structure and design
• Filtered views of content according to region, audience, program or topic
• An extranet via a secure log-in to access non-public content and function.