Consolidating Structure and Content Across Four Court Websites
Digital
Creative
Change
Challenge
Imagine needing court information at one of the worst moments of your life, only to be met with a maze of menus designed for lawyers, not humans in crisis. That was the reality across ACT Courts and Tribunal’s (ACTCT) four websites — ACT Courts, ACT Supreme Court, ACT Magistrates Court, and the ACT Civil and Administrative Tribunal (ACAT). After talking with 12 internal stakeholder groups, the picture became clear: these sites were trying to be everything to everyone.
Legal professionals needed depth and precision, while distressed members of the public just needed to find a form or an address without a law degree. Navigation was cluttered, entry points were unclear, content governance was patchy, and staff were stuck playing human tour guides, manually walking people through a site that should have spoken for itself. The mission was simple to state and hard to solve: build a structure clear enough that no one gets lost.
Approach
RD Consulting took on the first of three project stages: IA and UX research, working through multiple different phases. The team got inside users’ heads, building 9 distinct personas and designing with genuine care for people navigating trauma, low literacy, or accessibility needs. From there, a full component audit trimmed a sprawling list of 60+ down to a lean 23, backed by a robust Figma pattern library and design tokens for consistent branding across sub-sites. Interactive prototypes were then tested hands-on with real users, and the resulting insights and feedback were shaped into a final Information Architecture and set of content guidelines to guide the project forward
Impact
The result: a research findings report and interactive prototypes that don’t just look good, they make sense. Add to that a content style guide built for consistency across four very different sites.
RD Consulting didn’t stop at ticking boxes, either, offering forward-thinking recommendations and accessibility improvements grounded in real user feedback. What ACTCT walked away with was more than a deliverable, it was a validated, tested foundation ready to support a website that finally treats both nervous first-timers and expert legal professionals like they matter equally.
A human-centred foundation for a website that works for nervous first-timers and expert lawyers alike.
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