Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA)
Helping Australians to stay healthy and safe
The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) is the Australian government authority responsible for regulating medicines and medical devices. While this role has remained unchanged over time, recent years have seen a seismic shift in the TGA profile and audience reach, and have transformed their presence from being a behind-the-scenes, strong regulator helping Australians stay healthy and safe, to a front-stage, daily news presence as millions of Australians looked to them as a trusted authority for guidance through Covid-19.
Recognising the pivotal role its central website plays in disseminating vital safety updates, advice and guidance, the TGA initiated a digital transformation program where the website would lead the way as a modern digital front door for the TGA, with clear pathways to information and services for key audience groups.
The challenge
Folk led the digital transformation project, working closely with the TGA project teams to deeply understand and address the key challenges an organisation such as the TGA experience.
- The organisation itself is large and complex, with a range of internal and external stakeholders that represent vastly different divisions and focus areas needing to be consulted.
- The TGA have a broad and diverse audience base (a shared feature of most regulators), ranging from specialist professionals to consumers with a vested interest in topics and updates. The transformation needed to deeply understand these different needs and find a way to reflect key journeys for all audiences.
- Large amounts of complex and detailed content, reflecting legislative requirements and technical detail needed to be structured and redeveloped to become more accessible and comprehensible.
- The project needed to address over 15 years of design and technical debt on the current website to modernise the experience and functionality to reflect a trusted, contemporary organisation.
Deeply understanding users to inform design
The TGA site, supported by an ecosystem of portals and systems, attracts more than 5.5M visitors a month.
In order to define a successful future state for the new platform, we needed an evidence-based approach to overhaul the design and functionality to better serve its audiences and the TGA.
Through analytics, intercept surveys, consultation and 1:1 sessions we developed a clear picture of the different audience groups – their context, usage patterns and needs. And how they wanted to interact with TGA information and services in the future.
Building on this user research, we led design, content and technical workstreams that worked to identify detailed organisational requirements and define the future state.
Consistent and consolidated experiences
Our discovery phase of work identified inconsistency and fragmentation across content and the site experience that was impacting user trust and confidence. It also created unnecessary burden for the TGA in managing and maintaining the site.
We defined content and experience principles to guide teams and decision making. We aligned with the Health Design System to set consistent standards for the new website and other TGA digital products and services into the future – to create a sense of familiarity, ease and trust in user’s end to end journeys.
Delivery
Working with our longstanding development partner, Morpht, across the project lifecycle, we brought the future vision to life.
We identified early that GovCMS SaaS would be a suitable hosting and maintenance option for the TGA.
With a key requirement being bringing the the legacy Drupal 7 site up to the latest Drupal version and coding standards, we focussed on consolidating, rationalising and migrating over 112,000 content items to the modern platform. This meant that content needed to be transformed from 71 into 49 content types. To deliver on this, Morpht worked on an extensive migration mapping process and created 65 scripts to migrate and transform content.
Content strategy and content design
In addition to the automatic content migration being completed by Morpht (dealing with some 46,000 existing web pages and 16,000 files on the current website), thousands of pieces of content were up for redevelopment. The content workstream tackling this task was a project in its own right.
We worked with the TGA to develop a content auditing framework that validates the 'keep, edit, archive' process to transfer valuable content to the right place at the right time.
We created a workable framework to govern the priority and process of pages to revise, archive, and delete through research and content strategy principles based on analytics, legalisative and compliance requirements, business needs, product strategy, publishing workflows, and technical requirements.
The framework has helped their web experience team create a content production roadmap for the new website.
In addition to the content auditing framework, we developed the support guides needed to facilitate the consultation and production process between the Web Experience Team and TGA’s content owners.
The outcome
By leading and coordinating the user research, design, content and technical workstreams, Folk were able to meet all delivery milestones for the TGA.
A brand new site on GovCMS, with a contemporary look and feel underpinned by consistent structures and familiar patterns, is now the foundation for the next stage of the TGA’s digital transformation.
It provides the TGA with important tools to continue to educate and build confidence in the information and services it provides as it strives to keep Australians safe and healthy.
