Playgroup NSW

The design and build of a new website for Playgroup NSW was a large scale project undertaken over two years. 

The two key challenges were the size of the website with nearly 1000 pages on their existing site and 500 playgroups across the state, and the complexity, with the new site needing rich but user-friendly playgroup lookup functionality and behind the scenes, an integration with Playgroup NSW's new enterprise level Salesforce CRM.

The project started with user research to better understand their needs and goals, and ensure the subsequent design and build was grounded in a user-centred approach. Armed with the research and personas, journey modelling was undertaken with key stakeholders to  map out important user journeys through the new site, and develop an information architecture and navigation structure. 

From this, we created a wireframe prototype to determine the layout of all key screens and enable stakeholders to input and review at an early stage to aid internal engagement and buy-in. Detailed technical requirements and visual design followed, with a total of 26 unique layouts to be mocked up and iterated with input from the client. 

The fun, playful appearance and seamless user interface of the end result belies the highly complex build involving many stakeholders including a third party Salesforce agency and a specialist Salesforce developer. Website users can locate a playgroup that suits their specific needs quickly and easily, with a powerful custom-built filtering system that allows users to find playgroups not just based on location using an interactive map, but to filter the results by the child's age, culture and language, disability or developmental delay, carer type, special interest and more. 

They can also access a huge library of parenting resources on a wide range of topics, and find age appropriate play-based activities for indoors and outdoors. Individuals and organisations can apply for membership, find resources about starting a playgroup, and register new groups online. On an administration level, the integration with Salesforce allows the administration team to manage all of their membership and group data securely on Salesforce, rather than running two parallel systems.