Turning agency workshops into a product vision for nsw.gov.au

The Registry supports personal and administrative moments: recording a birth or death, arranging a marriage, changing a name and ordering certificates. People needed to understand the evidence required and enter the right transaction.

The outdated bdm.nsw.gov.au site was hard to update and inconsistent with other NSW Government sites. As the first agency moving into nsw.gov.au, it tested whether consolidation could improve a service rather than relocate pages.

The content carried policy, legal and operational meaning, not just words. Registry operations knew exceptions, policy specialists the rules, the contact centre the sticking points, and content and product teams the new platform; no view covered the whole customer task.

A page-for-page move would preserve findability problems and old assumptions. Yet changing a journey without the relevant specialist could omit an important requirement.

I organised initial stakeholder workshops around customer tasks, not the old site. We synthesised questions, constraints and failure points into three themes: what people were doing, what they needed before acting, and what the Registry needed to maintain.

The resulting product vision connected understandable information to complete transactions. It used shared nsw.gov.au patterns and a structure the Registry team could manage, rather than transferring content into a larger site.

I worked with the department on user research and mapped current-state journeys with pain and gain points. Separating content and navigation problems from policy and transaction requirements clarified what could change.

I co-designed new journeys with subject-matter experts, then wireframed, prototyped and tested them with users. The content design team and I built the agreed CMS structure, checking it against tested journeys rather than treating the prototype as a hand-off.

I did not redesign Registry policy, promise to remove every transaction constraint or create agency-specific patterns. We used shared nsw.gov.au patterns and focused on structure, comprehension and continuity into transactions.

Workshops placed operations, policy, contact-centre, content and product evidence against one journey. Specialists could challenge assumptions and see how another team’s constraint affected customers.

I returned successive versions to the service owners. Current-state maps established the problem, co-design created options, prototypes made direction concrete and user testing supplied evidence for iteration.

The Registry became the first agency in nsw.gov.au. Its services used clearer information and routes into online transactions rather than copying the former site.

The committed goals were understandable Registry information, efficient online transactions and content managed with greater knowledge of user behaviour. These were not quantified results; no completion, comprehension or publishing metrics are available.

A consolidation first needs a shared account of the service, not a new structure. Combining operational, policy and customer evidence showed what had to remain and what could improve. I carried that into later OneCX work: expose readiness and constraints early, then improve the service rather than preserve the replaced site.