Launching a fresh new face with the Victorian Small Business Commission.

The Victorian Small Business Commission (VSBC) works to empower Victorian small businesses through dispute resolution, advocacy, and education to support greater business potential.

With a wealth of informational resources and service offerings spanning capability building and mediation, the VSBC website makes valuable content easy to find, while championing small businesses and their role in Victoria.

Working in close collaboration with the VSBC team to achieve their vision, we developed streamlined user experiences and a new interface aesthetic to ensure small businesses can find the right resources and supports for success.

Getting down to business: identifying opportunities together.

Through a series of workshops with key VSBC stakeholders, we explored the opportunities and features that best support Victorian small businesses. Representatives from throughout the Commission provided valuable insights required to collaboratively scope enhancements and updates to facilitate the best experience possible.

With a diverse audience group spanning farmers, goods and freight owner drivers, landowners, retail tenants, and the lawyers who represent them—the VSBC site needs to be accessible, easy to use, and clean and contemporary.

During the discovery workshops, it became clear that the website needs to provide intuitive guidance through content hierarchy, site structure, and navigation.

Intuitive content architecture ensures small business owners can find meaningful and relevant materials or services quickly.

Content is available via multiple pathways to accommodate the wide range of audiences and their varying preferences for browsing information.

Once you’ve found the right content or resource, everything is optimised for easy readability and quick scanning, so that small business owners can get back to business.

Capturing insights in collaborative workshops.

The menu speaks directly to visitor needs to ensure the site is easy to navigate. A large, comprehensive menu effectively acts as a complete representation of the website’s content, offering clear pathways to material that meets specific user needs. Whether you’re looking for retail lease regulations or dispute resolution, you’ll find it quickly.

The website’s administrative back-end is similarly speedy with rapid page load times, optimised imagery, and page caching  contributing to a streamlined user experience.

Additionally, we improved the security of the website by implementing and configuring plugins and ensuring the CMS is up to date.

The VSBC’s new mega-menu in action.

Rapid prototyping for fast, meaningful feedback.

Having recently re-designed some of their marketing material, the VSBC team were keen to refresh and simplify their online aesthetics. With a compelling deadline, we worked in close collaboration with the VSBC to deliver for a timely launch.

We used a form of rapid prototyping to get a high-fidelity concept to the VSBC early on in the project.

Rapid prototyping allowed the VSBC team to visualise the exact look and feel of their new website. The high-fidelity concept also allowed us to test early assumptions regarding the information architecture, template limitations, and a complete design system to make life easy and efficient for developers.

The VSBC’s comprehensive design system specifies all usability instances.

The design system for VSBC is extensive, offering comprehensive guidelines on every visual intricacy the site has to offer. From button styling, form fields, bullet points, hyperlinks, and more, the design system for VSBC provides clarity and purpose for each element and interaction.

Accessibility was also a key factor in the delivery of this project. As a government website, the VSBC needs to align with AA WCAG compliance for web accessibility, which is incorporated in all facets throughout the site.

From font weights to colour choices, accessibility was considered in each and every design element.

Taking the VSBC online.

The VSBC website is easy to use and understand, accessible across all devices, and offers multiple pathways for people to find exactly what they’re looking for.

Visit the VSBC today to see the site’s refreshed interface and navigation, and check out how the Commission creates significant benefits for Victorian small businesses.