The Digital.govt.nz team did some research to check our understanding of how people used the website in , setting up future studies with these findings.
Website background
Digital.govt.nz has been around since . It replaced ict.govt.nz and the Web Toolkit as the place to go for all things about digital government.
Product Manager background
I had been a user of Digital.govt.nz over a number of years, before I was the Product Manager. I used it to look up, for example:
- the latest technology updates
- strategic documents
- information about the ever-changing landscape of New Zealand’s public service.
Helping people and doing the research to make sure this happens
Once becoming the Product Manager, my perspective changed and grew. I wanted a very clear view of the people using the website.
- Who was visiting?
- Where on the website were they checking?
- What were they looking for?
My background is one of cross-government collaboration. I’ve always been focused on end-to-end service and putting the customer at the centre of all that we do. After nearly a year as the Product Manager, I wanted to know more and understand whether we’re achieving this with Digital.govt.nz.
Assumptions before the research
Based on my experience, I had been making a couple of assumptions.
- Most readers of Digital.govt.nz were public servants.
- A number of ‘regulars’ visited the site, and these regulars were specialists. I originally thought they were people who came to Digital.govt.nz to find out specific information regarding a specific ‘thing’ instead of coming in to have a look around the site.
Research for Digital.govt.nz
Our User Experience (UX) Researcher took an in-depth look into Digital.govt.nz for the year of .
Using Google Analytics and other sources of feedback, we were able to understand patterns and trends across the website.
Some of the most interesting findings
- The number of visitors to Digital.govt.nz have almost tripled since — acknowledging that COVID-19 likely skewed these numbers.
- Our users mainly access Digital.govt.nz on a desktop computer, between Monday to Thursday from to .
- Most of the new content on Digital.govt.nz is shared organically by our community.
- Guidance pages drive users to Digital.govt.nz.
- The users of Digital.govt.nz have diverse needs and interests — as shines through in our top pages of .
Top pages in
- Grammar and Punctuation
- NZ Government Web Standards
- Digital Strategy for Aotearoa
- Accessibility
- Interim Generative AI guidance for the public service
- Cloud services
- Web Accessibility Standard 1.1
- Plain language
- Strategy for a Digital Public Service
Why research is important
This has been an extremely valuable exercise. It’s one that I hope to carry out each year, as ’s research added depth to my understanding of who uses Digital.govt.nz and how they use it.
’s research is a reminder that the use of statistics and insights can provide a good grounding, a baseline, for future thinking. We can refer back to it as we look to improve and evolve Digital.govt.nz.
Next up: finish and publish survey findings
In addition to the year-in-review research, we’ve completed a survey of users of Digital.govt.nz. Thank you if you’ve taken the opportunity to provide survey feedback.
Once we’ve analysed the survey findings, we plan to share the insights with you in a future blog post.
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