Background
This project was to revamp the existing Land Transport Authority (LTA) website. LTA is the governing body which oversees and is responsible for planning, operating and maintaining Singapore’s land transport infrastructure and systems. LTA wanted this website to be user friendly and easily accessible by the general public with regards to retrieving transport related information and updates on a daily basis. The objective was to make this site a one stop portal for any day to day land transport information.
The Challenges
Before embarking on a suitable turnkey solution, the team at Simsys conducted comprehensive background research on the existing website with a view towards understanding the viewership of the website, the profiles of the frequent users, the type of information users were looking for and finally to understand the problems users were facing when browsing the website.
Our Solution
From our usability studies, we identified key usablility issues faced by users.
A complete restructuring of the information architecture was conducted along with a complementary revamp of the existing site design to enhance key features and functionalities.
LTA had lot of useful articles written by experts for experts and this was another problem, because the message was not conveyed correctly to the public who were looking for the information and often misunderstood. This lead to a complete content rewrite based on the new structure in a layman terms and we added visual elements by using info graphics as the old saying goes 1 picture says a thousand words.
The system has been developed on the Government Content Management System and hosted in the Government Data Centre environment. When the template was design based on the new design mocks which were clean and simple, we had to be mindful that the administrators who managed the website would also be able update the content easily and still maintain the usability of the site. Extensive customization was done to the existing component of the CMS as well as new customized components were added to improve the usability of the site.
End Results Matter
After the website was commissioned, a simple survey has revealed that the public users are able to find the content easily and understand the information without any hassle. The Information Architecture (IA) & Usability Engineering (UE) exercise and the development techniques we had applied to the LTA project had proven to be a success and we were able to meet all project objectives.
To find out more about Information Architecture (IA) and Usability Engineering (UE), click here.