Decisive Action Training Environment (DATE)

Exercise designers across the Australian Defence Force (ADF) used to dig through internal systems to find the tactics they needed. Morpht rebuilt the Department of Defence's DATE website around their journey, with a new Tactics Hub, and the site now draws half its traffic from overseas partners.

The outcome

ADF personnel and partner nations now find training material and tactics in one place, at the right level for each stage of building an exercise.

50% of site traffic now comes from overseas partners
A new Tactics Hub gives exercise designers one place to find tactics, instead of searching several internal systems
Content structured around the user journey, validated through focus groups and journey mapping
Tactics appear automatically on relevant training scenario pages

Overview

Drupal 11 | Discovery | User experience | Convivial | Web development

DATE is the training system of choice for the ADF and its ABCANZ (American, British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand) partners. It models realistic operating environments across geopolitics, space, air, maritime, sub-surface, land, and information.

The website serves everyone from cadets to generals, plus other government agencies. It had to work for first-time and experienced users alike, helping them navigate training material, understand operating environments, download doctrine, and view tactics.

Visit the site

The solution

Morpht ran an extensive discovery, including customer journey mapping, to deliver a site that meets every audience's needs. A new Tactics Hub makes the most useful content and resources much easier to find.

Discover and empathise

We followed a human-centred design approach. Stakeholder workshops explored and prioritised the business objectives and the site's vision and purpose, then identified audience groups and created proto-personas for them.

Customer journey mapping

We validated the proto-personas through focus groups with end users. We then mapped the primary audience's journey in detail, capturing their needs at each stage of building training material.

Define an information architecture

Using these insights, we created an information architecture and wireframes for key pages. Users can navigate by the stage of their journey, or take shortcuts to tactics, the building blocks of every training exercise.

The Tactics Hub

Tactics were the users' most requested addition. They are now audiovisual content, classified so they appear automatically on relevant scenario pages and can be searched in the Tactics Hub. Each tactic links to related resources, eLearning modules, and internal systems for classified material.