The Situation
The Department of Industry’s website carried thousands of pages, a complex organisational structure, and competing publishing priorities from hundreds of internal and external stakeholders. When the Federal Government released the DTA Digital Service Standard (DSS), the Department faced a concrete compliance deadline alongside a deeper usability problem that had been accumulating for years.
The Department engaged ZXM to diagnose the structural conditions preventing a modern, DSS-compliant web experience — and to redesign both the site and the content publishing model to address them.
What the diagnostic found
Before any redesign was scoped, ZXM mapped the site’s content architecture and navigation model against the DTA Digital Service Standard requirements. Three structural conditions were producing both the compliance failures and the usability problems.
Global navigation had been built to reflect the Department’s internal structure rather than how users actually moved through the content. In some areas, nesting ran five or six levels deep — which meant that task completion was slow and abandonment rates were high. The publishing model required months of lead time to create sub-sites, producing a growing backlog of unmet business unit requests and an accumulation of workarounds. DSS non-compliance was a direct consequence of both conditions: the navigation model and the publishing constraint had never been designed together as a system.
What changed
The intervention targeted the navigation architecture and the publishing system simultaneously — the two structural conditions ZXM had identified as the source of both the compliance failure and the usability problem.
ZXM recommended a contextual navigation model over the existing global header. Rather than surfacing the Department’s organisational structure, the new navigation allowed users to browse through content within the relevant section of the hierarchy — reducing the number of steps to reach any given page. The mobile-first redesign rebuilt the entire site for small-screen access, which the previous architecture had not accommodated. The content publishing model was restructured to allow business units to spin up sub-sites in hours, removing the months-long lead time that had produced the request backlog.
What held
The redesigned website reached DTA DSS compliance in 8 weeks. Navigation depth was cut across the site — the five- and six-level nesting that had driven high abandonment rates was eliminated. The Department gained a first genuinely mobile-optimised experience. Sub-site creation time dropped from months to hours, resolving the accumulated backlog of business unit publishing requests.
The underlying condition — a navigation architecture and publishing model that had never been designed as a system — was addressed structurally. The capability remained in place after ZXM’s engagement concluded.
8-Week Delivery
Full site redesigned to DTA DSS compliance standards within 8 weeks of engagement.
Mobile-First Design
First genuinely mobile-optimised experience for the Department — navigation and layout rebuilt from the ground up for small screens.
Navigation Depth Cut
Deep nesting eliminated. Users navigate to content without working through five or six menu levels.
