City of Yarra

Yarra City is a vibrant inner-city municipality, positioned in the north and east of Melbourne’ s Central Business District.

This community’s members come from a broad range of backgrounds - from newly arrived immigrants with English as a second language, to young professionals enjoying an inner city lifestyle and art loving retirees who have recently downsized. 

The City of Yarra’s suite of websites had been expanding over the years as it’s services to the community had expanded. The City of Yarra recognised that this was not sustainable and that a complete digital overhaul was required including a new CMS.

Our challenge was to craft a suite of highly accessible, future proof websites that made both internal and community users lives easier when engaging with the City of Yarra. 

In order the understand such a complex task we decided to spend a significant portion of the project in the discovery stage, researching the City of Yarra's many stakeholders and users. Following a heuristic review of the current site we conducted intensive workshops and surveys with various user groups to gather all the information we needed and began synthesising it. 

Only once we had a thorough understanding of the City of Yarra ecosystem would we then sketch, test and design our way through to a comprehensive solution. The initial research stage also included gathering technical requirements that informed the selection of a recommended CMS.

Because of the wide reaching research and design phases we confidently delivered a suite of customer facing websites that were accessible, mobile friendly, consistent and above all, usable.

In addition the IA framework and strategy is scalable, serving City of Yarra well into the future.