Manningham City Council
One of Victoria's most multicultural communities.
Manningham City Council represents one of Victoria's most multiculturally diverse communities, with native speakers from many languages and backgrounds. Their website needed to meet the service-delivery needs of that diverse audience, including the 27 per cent of residents aged 60 or over, and the many more who have never had to navigate Australian local government before.
We rebuilt the platform on District CMS designed around how culturally and linguistically diverse communities actually search, group and label local government content.
Service for CALD communities goes beyond translation.
Clear and concise messaging is essential, but it's not enough on its own.
Real service delivery to culturally and linguistically diverse communities means understanding how migrant and multicultural residents engage with local government, and shaping the experience around that, not around the org chart.
Discovery, with the community.
We ran dozens of interviews with Manningham residents from a wide range of cultural backgrounds across six language groups. The output was a set of personas and site journeys that informed the strategy and shaped every design and development decision that followed.
Research into how people from different CALD communities search, group and label local government content shaped the site structure. Community involvement in the wireframe phase confirmed the navigation and search before any code was written.
Four pillars shaped the build.
Inclusive experience.
Clear and concise content, intuitive site menu and actionable page structure to enhance community engagement with the website.
Citizen-centric design.
Dedicated space for multicultural content, visual navigation and contemporary design to give the community presence on their website.
Intuitive admin interface.
A simple-to-use editorial interface that lets administrators create dynamic content with minimal training overhead.
Powerful functionality.
District CMS connectivity with Manningham's operational systems, with a wide range of content modules and smart forms.
From community research to connected platform.
Accessible by design. Governed by structure.
The platform was built to WCAG 2.1 AA, tested across assistive technologies and designed for residents who may have low digital literacy, limited English, or both.
Governance was designed to match Manningham's structure. The council operates across departments with distributed ownership of content. District CMS supports that with multi-layered approval workflows, roles, groups, and permissions configured to the council's internal processes, so content reaches the right reviewer before it publishes, without creating a central bottleneck.
Six objectives, end to end.
Listen.
Strong research focus on a culturally and linguistically diverse audience.
User interviews, card sorting, tree jack testing and wireframe validation.
Understand.
User segmentation and journey mapping uncovered the relationship between the council and its multicultural community.
Real interactions, real expectations.
Respond.
Clever and actionable UX, navigation and functionality.
Centred on transactional content for better digital service delivery.
Design.
Visual navigation through advanced menu, powerful site search, iconography and a smart tagging system.
The design does the wayfinding.
Visualise.
Content types, workflows and authoring rules suited to Manningham's departmental structure.
Partially-distributed ownership, no central bottleneck.
Integrate.
TechnologyOne, Micro Focus Content Manager (TRIM) and Weave GIS data sources brought into the platform.
One council, one connected experience.
A reimagined website. A connected community.
Through in-depth research, meaningful user testing and clever design, we reimagined the website and the user journey. The platform now enhances community engagement with the council and delivers better online services to one of Victoria's most diverse communities.
The outcome.
Council website on the horizon?
Local government, multicultural community, integrations, accessibility. We design for the people you serve, not the org chart.