NSW Food Authority

The NSW Food Authority engaged Morpht for migration to GovCMS and a design refresh. The results: a modern and accessible site that highlights the Authority's amazing work.

Overview

The NSW Food Authority regulates and monitors food safety across the entire food industry supply chain in NSW. It plays a vital role in protecting the health and wellbeing of the people in NSW through mitigating food safety risks, rapidly responding in the event of a food safety incident and providing education, training and technical information to consumers and industry.

The NSW Food Authority engaged Morpht to redevelop, refresh the design of its website and migrate the content from TRIM WCMS to GovCMS. The aim was to move to a scalable platform that delivers high-quality security protection and compliance.

NSW Food Authority expected the site to be architecturally sound, only needing improvements to its accessibility and mobile responsiveness.

The challenge

As with any site migration we’ve undertaken in the past, we were ready to delve into the site setup and CMS database to work out how to best extract pages, content types and define their inter-relationships. We found that TRIM CMS exposed content in HTML and XML with related documents. We identified:

6221 HTML pages
808 XML unique pages
1197 files

We extended that content with two external systems integrated into the site to surface a register for Approved Third Party Auditors and the ‘Name and Shame’ registers. Another hurdle in this race was the sourcing of content images stored on a different server to the site.

Visit the site

Project:

IA & Discovery
User experience design
Convivial for GovCMS
Drupal web development
Integrations
Accessibility

The solution

The NSW Food Authority engaged Morpht to refresh the designs, redevelop and migrate the content of its website to GovCMS. We couldn't just do that. We restructured the information architecture, ingested 5 different feeds, integrated with third party systems to surface timely and structured information that is easy to search and find.

Unpacking the site for migration

Understanding the architecture of the site, how many content types and how they relate to each other was an essential first step. We created automated scripts to extract the content and pages from 4 different sources:

site database
image server
external systems housing penalty notices
prosecution notice register

Restructuring the information architecture

After extracting all the content, we reviewed and defined a set of content types and how they relate to each. We developed a content model to structure the information and display it in different modes and layouts. Some of the content types we defined were:

4 news types e.g. media releases, recalls, advisories, etc
8 resource types e.g. factsheets, guides, policies, etc
Third party auditor
Training organisation
Penalty notice
Prosecution notice

Feeds and registers

An organisation such as NSW Food Authority with its broad oversight and responsibility for ensuring food safety needs a multitude of ways to consume and export data feeds. We created a variety of registers that consume and export XML data feeds that are searchable, filterable and sortable to improve the user experience. Here are a few examples

Integrated interactive tools

To support NSW Food Authority’s education focus we integrated interactive tools for consumers to understand food labelling and for startup businesses to learn about their food safety requirements and obligations.

NSW food authority interactive food labels

Shellfish harvest area alerts

A recent addition to the site is an application that consumes an external data feed about the safety and status of shellfish harvest areas. The application pulls in updates for the data feed, indexes them and surfaces the data on the site. Users can then filter and search through the feed for their relevant harvest area.

Refresh, modernise, simplify, make accessible

The four principal aims for the design refresh. Sure! Easy. And why wouldn’t it be?

We kick-started it by implementing our bespoke Drupal Distribution for GovCMS - Convivial. This is a cost-effective and timesaving solution. We adopted the NSW Design System and adapted Convivial to take on the relevant components and design patterns. This got us a long way towards reworking the existing content structures into new patterns and components. With this system in place, NSW Food Authority has at its fingertips the capability to build a variety of page layouts.

Usability, Accessibility, Discoverability

Our visual design approach focused on improving the user interface by simplifying layouts while being faithful to the brand guidelines and to the design system. Our aim was to drive up the usability of the site to help users discover relevant information on any device in the most straightforward way.

The outcome

Morpht went through an extensive discovery phase to re-structure the IA, define new content types and integrate multiple feeds for export to improve the user experience. Along with a fresh, modern and accessible design to drive up the usability of the site to help users discover relevant information on any device in the most straightforward way.

“Morpht’s approach to the project was focused on delivering value in the most efficient way. Their team complemented ours in a tight collaboration, providing valuable and prompt advice when and where needed. The toolset they delivered has enabled us to create pages and content and be highly responsive when rapid changes are required.. The resulting website is a success seeing a year on year 9.7% increase in traffic and 44% increase in time on page.”

Josephine Parrett
Manager Customer Service, Strategy & Operations | NSW Food Authority