Marketing Director
Zoe-Louise Bell
Hamilton City Council, in collaboration with leading digital transformation company Dynamo6, has unveiled its new and improved digital front counter —a modern website designed to enhance the user experience and streamline customer interactions.
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A user-first approach to design and development has transformed the Hamilton City Council’s website, providing exceptionally intuitive, fast, and secure interactions for citizens, visitors, and investors.
Hamilton City Council, in collaboration with leading digital transformation company Dynamo6, has unveiled its new and improved digital front counter —a modern website designed to enhance the user experience and streamline customer interactions. The project, a result of an extensive partnership between the Council and Dynamo6, aimed to transform the Council's online presence and provide a seamless platform for customers to access services and information.
Council Strategy and Communication General Manager, Sean Hickey, stated:
"This is a really significant milestone for us - probably the biggest change in how we meet our customer's needs in the last few years. The quality of D6's work on this project has been excellent, from visual design to site architecture to development. I think we have a website that is world-class now.
The previous Council website faced significant challenges due to a large, legacy system that no longer met modern digital standards. Additionally, the website's structure and content required a comprehensive overhaul to align with user expectations and improve accessibility. The collaborative effort between the Council and Dynamo6 addressed these issues head-on, resulting in ‘a digital front counter’ that caters to the diverse needs of the community.
Through interactive workshops and user research, the Dynamo6 team identified pain points and user journeys across the Council's 37 business units. Navigation difficulties and limited search functionality were common concerns, prompting a complete redesign of the information architecture. The Council's desire to create a website that surpasses local government standards led to benchmarking against other councils and large New Zealand businesses to ensure a world-class solution was delivered.
The redesign process incorporated both low and medium-fidelity prototyping to map user flows and also developed a comprehensive design system. The Council's brand received a digital upgrade within the guidelines of its existing brand elements, resulting in a vibrant, representative digital identity. The inclusion of uniquely Hamilton-Kirikiriroa graphics and a fresh colour palette contributed to the website's modern, approachable feel.
With a strong focus on user feedback, the new website underwent user acceptance testing to validate the user experience and ensure the solution effectively addressed unique user problems across different business units. The development phase, facilitated by an agile scrum team which included members from both Council and Dynamo6, resulted in a powerful, secure, and scalable platform utilising the Silverstripe CMS. Integration with Council APIs enabled seamless presentation of unique information directly from Council platforms, enhancing the user experience.
The website's search functionality received special attention, offering users an intuitive search overlay with deep filtering. The implementation of an Elasticsearch appliance to power the search engine leverages fuzzy logic and relevance tuning, resulting in accurate, efficient search results for end users.
Hosting the new website platform presented specific challenges, which Dynamo6’s Enterprise Hosting expertly addressed. The platform, powered by Google Cloud, provides high security, autoscaling, load balancing, and continuous deployment across both production and staging environments. Council now enjoys a speedy, high-quality deployment process without manual overheads.
Liam Blackwell, Council Senior Digital Communications Specialist, praised the outcome, stating,
This new website is a massive turning point for Hamilton City Council and how we build our services. It ultimately helps our communities by making things easier, whether they're registering a dog, paying a parking ticket—sorry!—or finding a playground to take your kids.
The new digital front counter reflects Hamilton City Council's commitment to providing a user-centric and accessible online experience. The revamped navigation, structured content, improved accessibility, and intuitive design contribute to an effortless user journey, enabling citizens to accomplish their goals seamlessly. The Council now stands at the forefront of local government websites, equipped with a world-class digital platform.