Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB) | Deepend

Positive Change by Design

Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB)

Designing a user-centric site for Australia’s key building and construction code regulator

The Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB) is the Federal standards body responsible for shaping regulatory measures to ensure sustainable building practices in Australia, and ensuring an orderly and consistent approach to building and construction in Australia. Their website had grown organically, along with their remit, over the years, resulting in large amounts of information collated in a disorderly way.

It was a challenge and a pleasure to reorganise the key components of such a diverse government body, into a more intuitive and user friendly site.

Rivqah Christie - Lead User Experience Consultant

Deepend were engaged to overhaul the information architecture, user experience and visual design across the ABCB site, as well as 3 focused microsites for their NCC, Watermark and Codemark components of their business. Taking a user centred approach, the strategic direction for the sites was formulated off the back of extensive user interviews and research. This saw efforts focused on the most valued sections of the site, developing key features such as the use of layered filtering within the search function for the research library.

With a focus on greatly improved functionality, such as the filterable search function, and a key pivot to creating separate content areas for Practitioners and Consumers, the new site provides a vastly improved resource base for all key user groups. Incorporating the new ABCB brand, the site is a contemporary and orderly site, providing fast and intuitive access to a range of key materials.

Deepend Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB)

Information Architecture was shaped after extensive interviews with key project stakeholders, from Builders to Policy makers, ensuring the right language and hierarchy was used to present the business.

Simple, subtle colour schemes developed to distinguish between the 4 key sub-divisions of ABCB

Outputs focused on a Design system for ABCB, with variations for each sub-brand. Using this as a basis, a core module set was then laid out to guide any future enahancements.

The design team worked in close collaboration with the internal ABCB development team, who had ultimate responsibility for developing the site in Drupal.