Therapeutic Goods Administration

While it’s no easy feat to sum up a year’s worth of work in getting the site over the line, three key themes emerge: 

• Search and findability
• Structured content
• Consistent and consolidated experiences 

As is customary at Morpht, our investigation pivoted around an extensive content modelling exercise to define content types and how they’re inter-related along with supporting taxonomies. We collaborated with the TGA User Experience  and Web teams to improve, rationalise and consolidate the 71 content types down to 49. We also established a key content type to surface all records from the ARTG data feed, expose each as a node with a unique URL. 

Knowing that the ARTG is the most accessed central database of more than 95,000 records of registered goods, we took the opportunity to create a node for each record and expose relationships to other data feeds. The aim was to give the user access to more connected information about the stages a registered good goes through. This also supports SEO to help improve the TGA’s ranking and authority in this space.

Ingesting the ARTG feed was especially labour intensive where we crafted and reworked scripts to create new nodes, check for updates, duplicates and unpublish deregistered goods. We enabled a faceted search interface to empower the user to find and filter content and access other related information about a product. We also made the ARTG search accessible from key pages on the site in addition to the main site search.

To give users immediate and easy access to data and content, we equipped them with 31 contextual faceted search interfaces, aside from the main site search. Users can now search through safety updates, product alerts, publications, as well as 17 different data feeds, most of which are associated with and linked up to the ARTG database.  The central site search now exposes information from all content types, feeds and the ARTG combined to support those users who prefer to search instead of navigate the site.  

With the aim of enhancing the user experience and focusing on ease of use, crafting consistent patterns was paramount to reducing the user’s cognitive load as they interact with familiar interfaces and navigate clear and simple hierarchies. We created a content type such as ‘Alert type’ as a classifier to surface the latest ‘Product alerts’ on a listing page and promote ones that require immediate action. 
We repeated this pattern for other content types such as News, Publications, etc. 

Data feeds across the site are now presented with the familiar faceted search interface and individual records laid out in a consistent fashion giving clear hierarchy to the presentation of data points.

We introduced the concept of a content magnet and the TGA fell in love with the idea. This is a component an editor can place on a page and configure it to display content from a variety of content types such as alerts, resources, publications, etc based on two classifiers:  ‘topic’ and ‘audience’. The magnet is like the swiss army knife of content management, exposing a wealth of information with minimal effort from the editor. But for the magnet to work we needed to get the house in order with the use of audiences and topics.

While these weren't new concepts for the TGA, they were, however, being used inconsistently and without much effect. We uplifted the Topic from the guise of ‘category’, created a node template for it and equipped it with pre-programmed views to surface ‘flow’ content such as news, alerts, updates etc.  We also used the topic as a classifier for most other content types to help expose content in faceted searches and of course the magnets. Editors can now create new topic pages without relying on developer skills. 

At Morpht, we have a long standing commitment to enabling and equipping site managers, editors, authors, and content creators with web management tools to reduce their reliance on developers to create page layouts. The TGA are now able to create new pages following established patterns and layouts, while having the flexibility to craft page layouts by using the extensive toolset we’ve built in Convivial for GovCMS paired with the Awesome Starter Kit developed by the Australian Department of Health Online Services area.

The legacy site was built on Drupal 7 and hosted privately. Hence the need to bring it up to the latest Drupal version and coding standards. We identified early on that GovCMS SaaS would be a suitable hosting and maintenance option for the TGA. 

As the TGA was keen to adopt the Awesome Starter Kit (ASK) developed by Dept of Health Online Services, we assessed its capabilities and identified the most suitable components based on the TGA needs. We also upgraded ASK to Drupal 9 and supplemented it with the toolset we have developed for our own starter site Convivial for GovCMS to deliver a hybrid solution that uses the Health Design System.

The imperative to consolidate and rationalise meant that content needed to be transformed from 71 into 49 content types. To deliver on that, we worked on an extensive migration mapping process and created 65 scripts to migrate and transform content. We ran and tested an initial migration and iterated on the migration scripts before running the full and final migration, all with the support of and close collaboration with the TGA User Experience and Web teams.

The migration process also included numerous rounds of fixing legacy redirects and implementing new ones to address the changes in URL structures and content that was unpublished during the content audit.