THE DEPARTMENT OF CLIMATE CHANGE, ENVIRONMENT, ENERGY AND WATER
Helping AdaptNSW understand its audiences and address gaps in the landscape to become a single destination resource for climate change adaptation across NSW.
PROBLEM
Strategy Action 8 of the 2022 NSW Climate Adaptation Strategy prioritises providing practical information, advice, and decision tools to help NSW prepare for climate change. To achieve this, the Adaptation Knowledge team within the NSW DCCEEW is conducting a discovery project to identify audience needs, assess current resources, and inform a customer-centric roadmap for delivering tools and advice through the AdaptNSW website and other channels.
APPROACH
The project begins with an alignment session to define the approach, deliverables, and timeline, followed by a review of the NSW Government adaptation products and contexts. Stakeholder mapping and participant recruitment shape the user research plan, while our workshops explored user motivations, barriers, and opportunities.
The insights guided a strategic review of national and international adaptation tools and an evaluation of NSW resources, including the AdaptNSW website, forum, and newsletter. We completed a website data analysis, completed user feedback sessions, IA testing, and content reviews to help inform our direction and shape the new value proposition. We refined existing archetypes and our recommendations shaped content and user experience enhancements for AdaptNSW.
OUTCOME
Building on the Discovery Project outputs, we developed hypotheses and “how might we” statements to address user needs by unpacking motivators and barriers. An ideation workshop with the DCCEEW core project team and selected internal stakeholders explored potential features and functionality. These ideas were then be collaboratively prioritised in a working session to define key opportunities and align on next steps. Finally, a roadmap was documented, incorporating complementary tools and services, and detailing requirements and priorities for implementation, setting the stage for Prototyping in Phase 3.
