The front door to government services for more than a million businesses across Australia is business.gov.au. Run by the Department of Industry, Science, Innovation and Resources, these digital services include registering for an Australian Business Number (ABN), identifying licence and permit requirements, and applying for grants.

Baseline reporting criteria included: What % of tasks could be completed without problems? How long did it take users to complete tasks? How easy or difficult did users rate the tasks?
Our baseline reporting was organised by six core research questions.

The department engaged Briarbird to conduct a detailed evaluation of the five major digital services, most of which involved complex customer interaction and forms.

The services included:

This project was initiated because the department wanted to measure the user experience of the digital services over time and evaluate the impact of planned improvements and change on users. The secondary aim of the project was to identify significant roadblocks and usability issues.

To achieve this we took a two-pronged approach:

  • Usability testing of each service with groups of typical users, based on common tasks. We undertook 79 test sessions in total, in five locations and across two states
  • Expert review of the services against standard usability heuristics. Our expert panel involved four independent reviewers.

The result was a series of detailed baseline reports for each service, from which future improvement can be measured.