Digital Audit, Design principles & Recommendations

Yarra Valley Water digital assets

The objective
Conduct a holistic Digital Design review of all YVW digital assets above the line of visibility. The focus was five of Yarra Valley Water's main digital touchpoints. We looked at these individually and also how they worked together to form a suite of products for YVW.

The goal
As our technology suite and capability evolves, our digital experiences will adopt and adapt, along with our products, services and design principles. This will surface to the user, more personalised interactions and touchpoints, no matter what stage in the customer journey and lifecycle they are in. We know and care about our customers, so we should provide them a personalised service.

The process
We went through all the reseach we had, spoke to the different agencies, where possible, that worked on the individual portals/projects and collected assets from them so we could do a thorough review. We had several workhops going through all the websites and assets - we had five main areas of focus; Accessibility, Iconography, Typography, Colour and Navigation. Different colour post its for each section and we marked up as many screens as we could to share back to the business. We put together a formal review document and presented it back to the business and key stakeholders. The report was 70 pages including appendices.

We did a landscape review of best practice of both companies in similar industries as well as those in completley different. We also did this to get a good sense of current design patterns that people are used to seeing and using.

A set of recommendations was also put together which went into detail about improvements to navigation, accessibility, consistent use of iconography across all touchpoints, a set of design principles to always refer back to when designing anything new and setting up a Design Language System with a style guide. This can be used as a base for all designers and if any projects are outsourced, agencies will have a set of tools to work from.

A selection of screens from the Review and Recommendations documents.