Creating an engaging way to visually browse the NSW Budget

With the NSW Treasury we designed an engaging and visually appealing way to browse the NSW budget. Leveraging user-centric design approaches, citizens can now easily navigate and understand the budget, fostering transparency, and promoting civic engagement.

The Challenge

The NSW Treasury had a narrow timeline to produce a proof of concept (POC) that delivered a highly engaging experience meeting the needs of both professional and private users.

Our Approach

The Research

The Customer Experience Company (CEC) led a research and design sprint that gave insight and understanding of the different user needs, and informed ever-improving concepts that were tested and reiterated with users.

Testing outputs fed into prototype co-design sessions with the Data Analytics Centre team, where a final POC was delivered.

Findings

We helped the NSW Treasury listen to the needs of NSW citizens and paved the way forward for the build team. It was clear that citizens responded well to simplicity and not so well to over complex data visualisations.

The Solution

The proposed design ensured citizens were provided with tangible, relatable examples that could be applied to their own situation.

This information was clearly presented and supported with contextual details including 4 key features:

A clickable donut graph showing expenditure and revenue for each government department
A clickable map to show where money is being spent in communities for each project
Clearly defined personas to explain how the budget impacts citizens in different ways
‘Fun facts’ to entertain and expand citizens’ views of the budget

An additional 5 concepts were proposed for the next iteration of the budget online.