You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.
Everyone is invested in government. We all own a piece of it, pay money for it via taxes, and benefit from it. As a public servant I’ve got two hats on — I experience government but I also have a part in trying to shape it while working on Govt.nz. To make sure the work we do on Govt.nz is focused on the right goal and stays on the correct path, we’ve drafted our vision and goals to help us.
Unashamedly, the main focus of the vision and goals is people. We want to make sure we’re doing work that’s going to have the most impact people’s lives — helping them understand, use and contribute to government. We want everyone, regardless of ability, age and culture, to be able to easily get what they need from government online.
We also want to make the government machine more open. Making it easy to understand makes it more transparent. It also saves people time, effort and money. For us to be able to do this we need to work in partnership, not just with other government organisations, but with everyone who wants to make a difference to government and New Zealand.
We know we don’t have all the answers, which is why we’d like your feedback. Let us know what you think.
Vision
- Provide government information and services that are useful to people
- Promote open and transparent government
- Be a trusted partner for digital government
Goals
- Increase usage of the digital channel by making government accessible to everyone, everywhere, and on any device
- Make what government does easier to understand
- Improve people's experience of government when the task involves more than one government organisation
- Reduce duplicated information across government
- Share our work and create solutions that can be used again
What we’ll do
- Make sure we’re AA compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
- Use plain English across the entire site, with a Flesch reading ease score of at least 60% for all content
- Collaborate with partners in government, and outside of it
How we’ll measure our goals
- We’ll use analytics to show that information moved to Govt.nz gets the same, or better, traffic from Google
- We’ll gather evidence to show that the number of calls to agency contact centres have gone down and the number of hard copy forms sent out reduced
- We’ll do user testing to ensure that moving information to Govt.nz has actually made things easier for people
- Other organisations will be using our API
- There will be a reduction in the duplication of contact details
