A scalable, composable digital experience platform (DXP) for Victorian road users
The Transport Victoria website enables the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning to manage its online presence and easily update road-related information.
Image 1: The Transport Victoria website provides essential information on road rules, safety, vehicle licensing, and registration services. It offers resources on safety campaigns, education resources, news and updates on major transport projects across Victoria, ensuring users stay informed about the state’s transport network.
The challenge
We were engaged by the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning to build out a new site on their Digital Experience Platform (DXP) on Sitecore XM Cloud, using Sitecore Search and developing the Transport Victoria Design System in Storybook.
The new site is Transport Victoria. It provides clear and accessible information about Victoria’s road network and active transport information to keep people who drive, roll or walk informed and safe when they’re using the state’s roads.
The client wanted to make the most of the Sitecore DXP by implementing a design system that would enable simple content creation, while facilitating future changes, scalability or expansion.
What we did
A modern DXP build
We leveraged a cutting-edge technology stack to deliver a high-performance, scalable and seamlessly integrated solution with these features:
Frontend: NextJS, ensuring a responsive and fast user interface
CMS: Sitecore XM Cloud, providing flexible content management capabilities
Mapping: Mapbox, enabling interactive geographical features
Hosting: Vercel, offering reliable and scalable cloud hosting
Our implementation was carefully designed to optimise the existing technology environment and align seamlessly with the Department's systems. This approach ensured maximum compatibility and efficiency, while also laying the groundwork for future enhancements and scalability.
By selecting these best-in-class technologies, we were able to create a robust, user-friendly platform that meets the Department's current needs and is well-positioned to adapt to future requirements. The combination of NextJS and Sitecore XM Cloud provides a powerful foundation for content delivery, while Mapbox integration enhances the site's functionality with crucial geographic data visualisation.
The use of Vercel for hosting not only ensures high availability and performance but also simplifies deployment processes, allowing for more frequent and smoother updates to the platform.
“Using Sitecore XM Cloud, Next.js, and Sitecore Search, we developed a scalable, high-performance Digital Experience Platform (DXP) designed to deliver uncompromising quality and reliability expected of government infrastructure that serves millions of people. It is built on zero-trust security principles, ensuring robust protection across the system. This solution sets a new standard for government digital services in terms of performance, usability and future-readiness.”
Created a design system of re-usable components
A design system contains re-usable components to make it simple for staff to maintain the site’s design integrity while quickly creating or re-purposing content.
The advantages of a design system include:
Consistency
Unified User Experience
Brand Cohesion
Efficiency
Reusable Components
Faster Development
Collaboration
Cross-Disciplinary Alignment/Single source of truth
Shared Vocabulary
Scalability
Adaptability
Maintainability
Quality
High Standards
Accessibility
Innovation
Foundation for Experimentation
Rapid Prototyping
Documentation and Education
Knowledge Sharing
Best Practices
Cost-Effectiveness
Resource Optimisation
Long-Term Savings
Easy-to-edit components in the DXP
Our team used designs in Figma to build components in Storybook and Sitecore, so content creators can easily grab components to build beautiful pages and entirely new sites.
Design System Diagram
Image 2: Design System – the VicTraffic and Transport Victoria websites can re-use Figma, Storybook, XM Cloud and Vercel designs, components and content.
Predictive search for enhanced findability
To improve information accessibility and user experience, we implemented Sitecore's advanced search capabilities. The Sitecore Search tool provides predictive search functionality, anticipating user queries and suggesting relevant results. We enabled site-wide content crawling, ensuring comprehensive search coverage across all web pages, and incorporated tag-enhanced filtering for more precise and relevant search results. This powerful search engine allows for fast response times and is designed to scale with growing content, maintaining performance as the site expands.
We customised the search experience to meet the specific needs of Transport Victoria's users. Tailored listings were created for key content categories including road rules, news updates and safety information. In-page information was made searchable, enhancing the discoverability of specific details within longer content pieces. We implemented filtering and sorting options, allowing users to refine search results based on their specific needs. The search interface was optimised for both desktop and mobile users, ensuring a consistent experience across devices. Additionally, we integrated search analytics to continuously improve result relevance based on user behaviour, further enhancing the overall user experience.
Image 3- This image demonstrates Sitecore's Search tool on desktop and its predictive search capabilities, helping users by anticipating their queries and providing relevant suggestions. This feature enhances the search experience, improving efficiency and user satisfaction by delivering more accurate results quickly.
Prioritised accessibility
The new public facing website meets WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards to ensure people using a range of devices can get the information they need.
Simplified Information Architecture (IA) through real user research
The streamlined Information Architecture (IA) we developed was founded on comprehensive user research, enabling visitors to navigate the Transport Victoria website with ease and efficiency.
“Developing Transport Victoria’s Information Architecture and taxonomy was driven by in-depth user research. We conducted both moderated (facilitated) and unmoderated (self guided) card sorting and tree testing activities, which ensured the structure was intuitive and aligned with real user needs.
The moderated sessions were critical in helping us understand ‘the why’ behind participant responses. This helped shape our understanding of how citizens interact, sort and categorise with transport-related information.”
This research informed the creation of an intuitive site structure, logical content groupings, and clear labelling conventions that align with users' mental models.
The resulting IA simplifies the journey for visitors seeking road rules, safety guidelines, or regional transport information, reducing cognitive load and improving overall user satisfaction. By prioritising real user needs and preferences, we ensured that the website's structure facilitates quick access to critical information, enhancing the overall effectiveness of Transport Victoria's digital presence.
Image 4 - Card sorting activities help improve Information Architecture (IA) by revealing how users naturally group and label content, ensuring the structure aligns with their expectations for easier navigation. Moderated sessions led by UX Designers offer valuable insights into user comprehension of card labels. When labels are unclear or make users struggle, these sessions help identify areas that need improvement, ensuring the language used within the IA aligns with user expectations.
Embedded teams approach
Our embedded teams approach enabled us to place our experts within a cross-functional team consisting of business and technology team members (UX/UI designers, scrum master, business analysts, content experts, testers, solution architects, product owners, change managers, project management personnel and SMEs) and work with other suppliers to streamline the project, improve communication and enhance the teams’ capabilities and leadership skills.
At different points in the project we provided the project flexibility with a range of roles for short or whole-of-project engagements to fill roles such as product manager, scrum master, UX lead, tech lead, developers and testers.
“As Scrum Master I worked with the whole team to train them in Agile ways of working. I used a range of approaches to ensure everyone felt engaged and safe while overcoming challenges from the design phase right through to development and testing. Trust is a vital ingredient to ensure everyone’s motivated to improve the way we work. I like to make retros and ceremonies meaningful and impactful. There’s no lip-service: actions after a retro are essential. After a retro we’ll often have someone going off to do some research into a question, write some documentation to help other team members solve problems, or come up with new processes altogether. All our efforts clearly improve us as a team while also improving the project.”
Testing, testing support, security and performance testing support and release management
Our team worked collaboratively with DTP UAT testers to support manual and regression testing and execute the automation suite at agreed times. We worked with security testing vendors to validate environment expectations and resolve issues agreed by the client.
Post go-live support
Following the successful launch of the Transport Victoria website, we implemented a comprehensive post-go-live support strategy to ensure a smooth transition and optimal performance.
This began with an 8-week hyper-care period, during which our dedicated team provided rapid issue resolution, and performance optimisation. We conducted regular check-ins with key stakeholders, swiftly addressed user feedback, and made necessary refinements to enhance the user experience.
The result
The scalable, composable content system enables the Department to efficiently manage its online presence and easily update road-related information.
The development of the new Transport Victoria site enabled the Department of Transport and Planning to separate information about licensing and registration from other road-related information. The new site enables Department of Transport and Planning staff to easily update the site with road-related news, changes to road laws and safety advice.
Victorian citizens using the site will enjoy an accessible design that enables them to quickly find trustworthy information about Victoria’s road rules, road safety, active transport and regional roads. Customers using this site don’t need to know which government department is responsible for which service – the customer journey has been considered and links provide seamless access to all vehicle and road-related issues, so they can be directed to the relevant site if they want information about licensing and registration.
This user-centric, technologically advanced platform meets current needs and can also grow in future to serve the Victorian community.
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