Optimal Blog

The Ministry for Primary Industry’s (MPI) customers have some of the most varied information needs — possibly the most varied in New Zealand. MPI provides information on how to follow fishing rules, what the requirements are to sell dairy products at the market, and how to go about exporting honey to Asia. Their website mpi.govt.nz has all the information.

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However the previous website was dense and complicated, and MPI’s customers were struggling to find the information they needed, often calling the contact center instead — one of several indicators that people were lost and confused on the website.

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Ruth Hendry, Head of Strategic Growth at Springload, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, about how new IA helped MPI’s broad range of customers find the information they needed.

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In her talk, Ruth takes us through the tips and techniques used to create an IA that met a wide variety of user needs. She covers the challenges they faced, what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what her team would do differently next time.

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Background on Ruth Hendry 💃🏻

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Ruth was Springload’s Content Director; now she’s Head of Strategic Growth. She has broad experience in content, UX, and customer-led design. A data nerd at heart, she uses analytics, research and testing to drive decision-making, resulting in digital experiences that put the customer at the forefront.

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At Springload Ruth has worked on large-scale content and information architecture projects for organisations including Massey University, Vodafone and Air New Zealand. She got into the world of websites in her native UK, working on Wildscreen's ARKive project. After she arrived in Aotearoa, she spent four years looking after Te Papa's digital content, including the live broadcast of the colossal squid dissection. She's Springload's resident cephalopod expert.

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She finds joy in a beautiful information architecture, but her desk is as messy as her websites are tidy.

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Contact Details:

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Email address: ruthbhendry@gmail.com

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LinkedIn URL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ruth-hendry-658a0455/

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Food recalls, fishing rules, and forestry: creating an IA strategy for diverse audience needs 🎣

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Ruth begins her talk by defining IA. She says, “If IA is the way information is organized, structured, and labeled, then an IA strategy is the plan for how you achieve an effective, sustainable, people-focused IA.”

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Considering this, applying an IA strategy to the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) website was a challenge due to its diverse user groups. MPI is responsible for a range of things, such as publishing food recalls, looking after New Zealand’s biosecurity, outlining how much fish can be caught, how to export products, and even how to move pets between countries. Needless to say, the scope of this IA project was huge.

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The current state of the website was challenging to navigate. In fact, one customer said, “It’s hard to find what you need and hard to understand”. MPI Contact Center staff often found themselves simply guiding customers to the right information online over the phone. 

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So, in solving such a massive problem, does having an IA strategy work? Ruth says yes! And it can have a huge impact. She backs up her strategy with the results of this project before broadly outlining how she and her team achieved the following improvements.

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The project achieved:

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• 37% decrease in time spent on the home page and landing pages
  • Customers found where they needed to go, faster, using the new IA and navigation elements
• 21% decrease in on-page searches
  • People could find the content they need more easily
• 53% reduction in callers to MPI saying that they couldn’t find what they needed on the website
  • Users could more easily get information online

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Developing an IA strategy 🗺️

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Ruth attempts to summarize 14 weeks' worth of work that she and her team delivered in this project.

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Step one: Understanding the business

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During this step, Ruth and her team looked at finding out exactly what MPI wanted to achieve, what its current state is, what its digital maturity is, what its current IA was like (and the governance of it), how the site got to be in the way that it was, and what their hopes and aspirations were for their digital channels. They conducted:

• Stakeholder interviews and focus groups
• Reviewing many, many documents
• Domain and analogous search
• Website review

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Step two: Understand the customers

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In this step, the team looked at what people want to achieve on the site, their mental models (how they group and label information), their main challenges, and whether or not they understood what MPI does. They conducted:

• A review on website analytics and user needs
• In-person interviews and prototype testing
• Card sorts
• Intercepts
• Users surveys
• Treejack testing

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Step three: Create the strategy

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This talk doesn’t cover strategy development in depth, but Ruth shares some of the most interesting things she learned (outlined below) throughout this project that she’ll take into other IA strategy projects.

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Why it matters 🔥

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Throughout the project, Ruth felt that there were eight fundamental things that she would advise other teams to do when creating an IA strategy for large organizations with massively diverse customer needs. 

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1. Understand the business first: Their current IA is a window into their soul. It tells us what they value, what’s important to them, and also the stories that they want to tell their customers. By understanding the business, Ruth and her team were able to pinpoint what it was about the current IA that wasn’t working.
2. Create a customer matrix: Find the sweet spot of efficient and in-depth research. When an organization has a vast array of users and audience needs, it can often seem overwhelming. A customer matrix really helps to nail down who needs what information.
3. Card sort, then card sort again: They are the best way to understand how people’s mental model works. They are critical to understanding how information should be organized and labeled. They are particularly useful when dealing with large and diverse audiences! In the case of the MPI project, card sorts revealed a clear difference between business needs and personal needs, helping to inform the IA.
4. Involve designers: The earlier the better! User Interface (UI) decisions hugely influence the successful implementation of new IA and the overall user journey. Cross-discipline collaboration is the key to success!
5. Understand the tech: Your IA choice impacts design and tech decisions (and vice versa). IA and tech choices are becoming increasingly interrelated. Ruth stresses the importance of understanding the tech platforms involved before making IA recommendations and working with developers to ensure your recommendations are feasible.
6. Stakeholders can be your biggest and best advocates: Build trust with stakeholders early. They really see IA as a reflection of their organization and they care a lot about how it is presented.
7. IA change drives business change: You can change the story a business tells about itself. Projects like this, which are user-centric and champion audience thinking, can have a positive effect throughout the business, not just the customer. Sometimes internal business stakeholders' thinking needs to change before the final product can change.
8. IA is more than a menu: And your IA strategy should reflect that. IA captures design choices, content strategy, how technical systems can display content, etc.

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Your IA strategy needs to consider

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• Content strategy: How is content produced, governed, and maintained sustainably going forward?
• Content design: How is content designed and does it support a customer-focused IA?
• UI and visual design: Does UI and visual design support a customer-focused IA?
• Technical and functional requirements: Are they technically feasible in the CMS? And what do we need to support the changes, now and into the future?
• Business process change: How will business processes adapt to maintain IA changes sustainably in the long term?
• Change management and comms plan: How can we support the dissemination of key changes throughout the business, to key stakeholders, and to customers?

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Finally, Ruth reemphasizes that AI is more than just designing a new menu! There’s a lot more to consider when delivering a successful IA strategy that meets the needs of the customer - approach the project in a way that reflects this.

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Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

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Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.

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Eniola Abioye

Join us for a FREE Fireside chat on Jan 31st @ 12-1pm PST (Jan 30th at 9am NZT) with Eniola. You’ll learn about her career journey from integrative biology to UX, 3 things that are changing about the industry, and what you need to know to transition into UX this year. This is a casual, Q/A style conversation so bring your questions and get excited to meet Eniola!

Eniola Abioye, Founder of UX Outloud and UX Researcher at Meta will be hosting a HYBRID masterclass to help you uplevel your UX career. This event will take place on Feb 24th in the SF Bay Area & virtually worldwide!

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Speaker Bio

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I help UX Researchers improve their research practice. Whether you’re seasoned and looking to level up or a new researcher looking to get your bearings in UX, I can help you focus and apply your skillset.

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Now, I am a UX Researcher at Meta and speak to all different types of users their experience on the platform. I take an agile approach and often employ Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation. I am innately curious, a self-starter, adaptable and communicative with a knack for storytelling.

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Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn! 🥗

It’s no secret - New Zealand has a diversity problem in design and technology. 

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Throughout her career, Sachi often felt like the odd one out - the only woman, the only Pasifika person, the one who laughed too loud, the one who looked different and sounded different. But as a leader, Sachi has been able to create change.

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Sachi Taulelei, Head of Design, ANZ, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, on how she is building a diverse team of designers at New Zealand’s largest bank.

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In her talk, Sachi shares the challenges she’s faced as a Pasifika woman in design and technology; and how this has shaped her approach to leadership and her drive to create inclusive environments where individuals and teams thrive.

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Background on Sachi Taulelei

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Sachi is a creative strategist, a design leader, and a recovering people pleaser. She has worked in digital and design for over 25 years, spending most of her career creating and designing digital experiences centered on people.

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As a proud Pasifika woman, she has a particular interest in diversity, equity, and inclusion. She has spoken out about the need for more diversity within design and technology and the impact it can have on the technology we create.

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Sachi is passionate about giving back - when she's not running after her two kids, you'll find her mentoring Pasifika youth, cheering on young leaders through the Young Enterprise Scheme, judging awards for Women in AI, or volunteering at the local hospice.

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Contact Details:

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Email: sachi.taulelei@anz.com

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sachi-taulelei/

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Odd one out: embracing diversity in design and technology ✨

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Looking and sounding different from her peers, Sachi always felt like she was trying to find her place in the office. She always felt like she didn’t belong. 

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Sachi has experienced all forms of racism and discrimination as a result of her heritage. These experiences aren’t spoken about and often go unnoticed by the majority. She has held equivalent jobs to male counterparts but received lower pay, and was advised to change her name from Sachi to Sacha on her job applications to improve her chances.  

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Sachi’s response was to work hard and become great at what she does, which was recognized over time. Slowly, she began to rise through the ranks. However, having reached leadership roles, she struggled to be heard and participate, without knowing why. The advice was given freely by managers to “stick at it”, to “grow thicker skin”, and to grow through the “school of hard knocks”. Although this advice worked at face value and she flourished, Sachi began to feel like a fraud and constantly second-guessing herself. She began to “edit” herself to fit into an acceptable mold and, in doing so, felt like she lost part of who she was.

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What is success? 🏆🎯💎

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Success often comes in the form of our leaders who have already climbed the mountains of achievement. When you see success in this way, as someone who doesn’t fit the mold, there is pressure to conform to get ahead. Using the same tools and advice given to these leaders, she realized, would actually hold her back. 

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Realizing true value through our uniqueness 🪐🦋

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Sachi recounts the treatment of Japanese-American citizens in the U.S. in the years following Pearl Harbour, where Japanese-American citizens were moved to concentration camps. This happened despite an official report finding conclusively that there was no threat from this population. Even though Germany and Italy were also at war with the U.S., for example, citizens with Italian and German heritage were not treated this way. This caused immeasurable pain, shame, and fear for the victims, and fostered a head-down, work-hard mentality in order to try and forget the treatment they received. This attitude, Sachi believes, was passed down to her from her ancestors who experienced that reality. Sachi explains that while there are many things that can hold someone back in life, creating meaningful change starts with introspection. Often, that requires us to work through fear and shame.

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Reflecting on her heritage, which is part Samoan and part Japanese, Sachi started to embrace her unique traits. In her case, she embraced the deep empathy and human compassion from her Japanese side and the deep sense of community and connection from her Samoan side. Her uniqueness is something to celebrate, not to hide behind. 

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Becoming a leader and realizing this, Sachi wanted to create a team culture based on equity, openness, and a sense of belonging – all things that Sachi wished for herself on her journey.

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Why it matters 💫

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Once she understood herself and what she wanted for her team, Sachi set to work on building a new team culture. Sachi breaks down key learnings from how she turned this vision into reality.

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Define

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Define what diversity means for your team. You need to clearly understand what it is you want to achieve before you can achieve it. For Sachi’s team, they knew that they wanted to create a team that was representative of New Zealand. Sachi knew, for example, that she had a lack of Māori and Pacific representation within the team. Māori and Pasifika represent 25% of the population. So, an effort was made to increase ranks by hiring talent from these cultures. 

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Additionally, Sachi focused on creating new role levels - from intern right through to graduates, juniors, and intermediate-level positions. This helped to acknowledge age differences within her team and also helped to manage career progression opportunities.

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Effort 

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It can be difficult to achieve diversity and inclusion and it requires a lot of work. For example, Sachi learned that posting an ad on job boards and expecting to receive hundreds of Māori and Pasifika applicants wasn’t realistic. Instead, partnerships were built with local design schools, and networking events were consistently attended. Job referrals from within the team were also leveraged, as well as establishing a strong direction for recruitment specialists within the organization.

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Sachi also recognized that, as a leader, she needed to be more visible and more vocal about sharing her views of the world and what she was trying to achieve. It was important to be clear about the type of culture she was building within her team so that she could promote it.

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In less than a year her team grew (from 11 to 40!) which meant a focus on building an inclusive team culture was required. The central theme throughout this time was, “You have to connect to yourself and your strengths first and foremost, before you can connect with others and as a team”. This meant that the team used tools like the Clifton Strength Finder, in order to learn about themselves and each other. Each designer was then encouraged to delve into their own natural working styles and were taught how to amplify their own strengths through various workshops. This approach also becomes handy when recruiting and strengthening potential weak spots.

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Integrity

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It’s important to have leaders who care - you can’t do it on your own. There can be pain points on the journey to creating diversity and inclusion, so it’s necessary to have leaders who listen, support, and work through some of the challenges that can arise.

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Benefits of diversity and inclusion in design teams 👩🏼🤝👨🏿

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Why push for diversity and inclusion? Sachi argues that the benefits are evident in the way that her team designs. 

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For example, her team:

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• Insist that research is done with diverse customer groups
• Advocates for accessibility when no one else will
• Understand problems from different perspectives before diving into a project

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Most importantly, the benefits show up in the way that each other is treated, and the relationships that are built with key stakeholders. Diversity and inclusion are wins for everyone - the team, the organization, and the customer.

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Natalie and Lulu have forged a unique team culture that focuses on positive outputs (and outcomes) for their app’s growing user base. In doing so, they turned the traditional design approach on its head and created a dynamic and supportive team. 

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Natalie, Director of Design at Hatch, and Lulu, UX Design Specialist, recently spoke at UX New Zealand, the leading UX and IA conference in New Zealand hosted by Optimal Workshop, on their concept of “radical collaboration”.

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In their talk, Nat and Lulu share their experience of growing a small app into a big player in the finance sector, and their unique approach to teamwork and culture which helped achieve it.

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Background on Natalie Ferguson and Lulu Pachuau

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Over the last two decades, Lulu and Nat have delivered exceptional customer experiences for too many organizations to count. After Nat co-founded Hatch, she begged Lulu to join her on their audacious mission: To supercharge wealth building in NZ. Together, they created a design and product culture that inspired 180,000 Kiwi investors to join in just 4 years.

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Contact Details:

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Email: natalie@sixfold.co.nz

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natalieferguson/ and https://www.linkedin.com/in/lulupach/

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Radical Collaboration - How teamwork makes the dream work 💪💪💪

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Nat and Lulu discuss how they nurtured a team culture of “radical collaboration” when growing the hugely popular app Hatch, based in New Zealand. Hatch allows everyday New Zealanders to quickly and easily trade in the U.S. share market. 

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The beginning of the COVID pandemic spelled huge growth for Hatch and caused significant design challenges for the product. This growth meant that the app had to grow from a baby startup to one that could operate at scale - virtually overnight. 

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In navigating this challenge, Nat and Lulu coined the term radical collaboration, which aims to “dismantle organizational walls and supercharge what teams achieve”. Radical collaboration has six key pillars, which they discuss alongside their experience at Hatch.

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Pillar #1: When you live and breathe your North star

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Listening to hundreds of their customers’ stories, combined with their own personal experiences with money, compelled Lulu and Nat to change how their users view money. And so, “Grow the wealth of New Zealanders” became a powerful mission statement, or North Star, for Hatch. The mission was to give people the confidence and the ability to live their own lives with financial freedom and control. Nat and Lulu express the importance of truly believing in the mission of your product, and how this can become a guiding light for any team. 

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Pillar #2: When you trust each other so much, you’re happy to give up control

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As Hatch grew rapidly, trusting each other became more and more important. Nat and Lulu state that sometimes you need to take a step back and stop fueling growth for growth’s sake. It was at this point that Nat asked Lulu to join the team, and Nat’s first request was for Lulu to be super critical about the product design to date - no feedback was out of bounds. Letting go, feeling uncomfortable, and trusting your team can be difficult, but sometimes it’s what you need in order to drag yourself out of status quo design. This resulted in a brief hiatus from frantic delivery to take stock and reprioritize what was important - something that can be difficult without heavy doses of trust!

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Pillar #3: When everyone wears all the hats

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During their journey, the team at Hatch heard lots of stories from their users. Many of these stories were heard during “Hatcheversery Calls”, where team members would call users on their sign-up anniversary to chat about their experience with the app. Some of these calls were inspiring, insightful, and heartwarming.

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Everyone at Hatch made these calls – designers, writers, customer support, engineers, and even the CEO. Speaking to strangers in this way was a challenge for some, especially since it was common to field technical questions about the business. Nevertheless, asking staff to wear many hats like this turned the entire team into researchers and analysts. By forcing ourselves and our team outside of our comfort zone, we forced each other to see the whole picture of the business, not just our own little piece.

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Pillar #4: When you do what’s right, not what’s glam

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In an increasingly competitive industry, designers and developers are often tempted to consistently deliver new and exciting features. In response to rapid growth, rather than adding more features to the app, Lulu and Nat made a conscious effort to really listen to their customers to understand what problems they needed solving. 

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As it turned out, filing overseas tax returns was a significant and common problem for their customers - it was difficult and expensive. So, the team at Hatch devised a tax solution. This solution was developed by the entire team, with almost no tax specialists involved until the very end! This process was far from glamorous and it often fell outside of standard job descriptions. However, the team eventually succeeded in simplifying a notoriously difficult process and saved their customers a massive headache.

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Pillar #5: When you own the outcome, not your output.

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Over time Hatch’s user base changed from being primarily confident, seasoned investors, to being first-time investors. This new user group was typically scared of investing and often felt that it was only a thing wealthy people did.

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At this point, Hatch felt it was necessary to take a step back from delivering updates to take stock of their new position. This meant deeply understanding their customers’ journey from signing up, to making their first trade. Once this was intimately understood, the team delivered a comprehensive onboarding process which increased the sign-up conversion rate by 10%!

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Pillar #6: When you’re relentlessly committed to making it work

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Nat and Lulu describe a moment when Allbirds wanted to work with Hatch to allow ordinary New Zealanders to be involved in their IPO launch on the New York stock exchange. Again, this task faced numerous tax and trade law challenges, and offering the service seemed like yet another insurmountable task. The team at Hatch nearly gave up several times during this project, but everyone was determined to get this feature across the line – and they did. As a result, New Zealanders were some of the few regular investors from outside the U.S that were able to take part in Albirds IPO. 

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Why it matters 💥

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Over four years, Hatch grew to 180,000 users who collectively invested over $1bn. Nat and Lulu’s success underscores the critical role of teamwork and collaboration in achieving exceptional user experiences. Product teams should remember that in the rapidly evolving tech industry, it's not just about delivering the latest features; it's about fostering a positive and supportive team culture that buys into the bigger picture.

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The Hatch team grew to be more than team members and technical experts. They grew in confidence and appreciated every moving part of the business. Product teams can draw inspiration from Hatch's journey, where designers, writers, engineers, and even the CEO actively engaged with users, challenged traditional design decisions, and prioritized solving actual user problems. This approach led to better, more user-centric outcomes and a deep understanding of the end-to-end user experience.

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Most importantly, through the good times and tough, the team grew to trust each other. The mission weaved its way through each member of the team, which ultimately manifested in positive outcomes for the user and the business.

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Nat and Lulu’s concept of radical collaboration led to several positive outcomes for Hatch:

• It changed the way they did business. Information was no longer held in the minds of a few individuals – instead, it was shared. People were able to step into other people's roles seamlessly. 
• Hatch achieved better results faster by focusing on the end-to-end experience of the app, rather than by adding successive features. 
• The team became more nimble – potential design/development issues were anticipated earlier because everyone knew what the downstream impacts of a decision would be.

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Over the next week, Lulu and Nat encourage designers and researchers to get outside of their comfort zone and:

• Visit customer support team
• Pick up the phone and call a customer
• Challenge status quo design decisions. Ask, does this thing solve an end-user problem?

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Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

‍

Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.

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Ally Tutkaluk

A multi-faceted approach is key when creating digital products for users who may be in a vulnerable, sensitive, or distressed state. Adopting an approach to copy, design, and testing that considers the unique needs of your main user group not only enhances their experiences, but improves the product for everyone.

From user interviews, to copywriting, to IA decisions, to testing - Ally will cover tools and tips for how you can ensure vulnerable users needs’ are considered at every stage of the digital design process.

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Speaker Bio

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Ally has worked in digital experience in the higher education, FMCG, and not-for-profit industries for over 14 years, most recently at Australian healthcare charity Lives Lived Well. She’s passionate about working with users to create data-driven, meaningful and valuable digital content and navigation pathways. She lives in Brisbane and also teaches Design Thinking at the Queensland University of Technology.

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Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n’ Learn 🌮🍕🥪

Every month we have fun and informative “bite sized” presentations to add some inspiration to your lunch break.  These virtual events allow us to partner with amazing speakers, community groups and organizations to share their insights and hot takes on a variety of topics impacting our industry. 

‍

Join us at the end of every month for Lunch n' Learn.

‍

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Susanna Carman

The world is growing increasingly volatile and uncertain. Design practitioners working during these times are tasked with bringing skills and professional expertise to help solve complex customer and internal-facing challenges. However, many of us are operating in professional contexts that are resistant to change, struggle to understand what we do, or are unable to fully embrace the value we have to offer. Trying to do ‘good’ work in these conditions can be isolating, frustrating and anxiety producing. In order to sustain our capacity for impact, now is the time to invest in integrating our own well-being into our design practice.

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Design Leadership & Learning specialist, Susanna Carman, returns to offer 60-minutes of sanctuary for those who would like to explore the questions:

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• What does it take for us and our practice to BE well?
• What’s the relationship between well-being, self-leadership & impact?

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Susanna will present and share restorative practices that deepen understanding, enhance capacity for self-care, and reframe the quality of impact we can have with others in our professional roles.

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Speaker Bio

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Susanna Carman is a Strategic Designer and research-practitioner who helps people solve complex problems, the types of problems that have to do with services, systems and human interactions. Specializing in design, leadership and learning, Susanna brings a high value toolkit and herself as Thinking Partner to design leadership and change practitioners who are tasked with delivering sustainable solutions amidst disruptive conditions. 

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Susanna holds a Masters of Design Futures degree from RMIT University, and has over a decade of combined experience delivering business performance, cultural alignment and leadership development outcomes to the education, health, community development and financial services sectors. She is also the founder and host of Transition Leadership Lab, a 9-week learning lab for design, leadership and change practitioners who already have a sophisticated set of tools and mindsets, but still feel these are insufficient to meet the challenge of leading change in a rapidly transforming world.

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Grab your lunch, invite your colleagues and we hope to see you at our next Lunch n' Learn 🌮🍕🥪