Testing a Government Sustainability Website

The New Zealand Ministry for the Environment has issued a Request for Proposal to do content relevance and usability testing of the sustainability.govt.nz website. There is a 17 page, 253kb MS-Word document with the requirements. This provides a useful overview of what is required in such evaluations. Curiously, the RFT does not ask for an accessibility testing of the web site.

GETS Reference: 23497
Title New Zealand based opportunity Content relevance and usability testing of sustainability.govt.nz website

Request for Proposal
...
General Information The nature of the project is to conduct target audience testing of the sustainability.govt.nz website, including relevance of content and usability that will inform the proposed refresh of the site scheduled for early 2009 (refer to schedule 1).

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Additional Documentation to Download
File Name Description File Type File Size
RFP Content relevance and usability testing of sustainability.govt.nz.DOC RFP Content relevance and usability testing of sustainability.govt.nz WORD 253kb


Relates to the following TenderWatch Categories
864 Market research and public opinion polling services
846 Web development services

From: Content relevance and usability testing of sustainability.govt.nz website, NZ Government, 2008

SCHEDULE 1: THE PROJECT

BACKGROUND
The Ministry for the Environment’s Household Sustainability Team launched the sustainability.govt.nz website in December 2007. The website was developed to raise awareness and help inform people about the sustainable choices they can take in their homes, in the areas of waste reduction, building, renovating, energy, water efficiency and transport.
A series of user personas was developed during the initial design phase of the sustainability.govt.nz website. Since sustainability.govt.nz was developed, the Household Sustainability Team has commissioned market research to allow segmentation of the population and appropriate targeting of interventions to the segments based on what motivates particular groups of people. This research has allowed further refinement of the sustainability.govt.nz target audience (see below).

Since its development, sustainability.govt.nz underwent a minor refresh in June 2008. This refresh included changes to the visual design and usability of the site. An online survey of the site’s current users has also been conducted. This survey will help gain a greater understanding of who the users are, why they are using the site, and their expectations for the site. It is expected that this survey will contribute to the project to test content relevance and usability for the site’s target audience.

The long-term direction of sustainability.govt.nz is to further develop its ability to bring about behaviour change in the target audience in the areas of waste reduction, building, renovating, energy, water efficiency and transport. Testing the relevance of existing content and usability of sustainability.govt.nz for the site’s target audience is part of the wider development of the site. A larger refresh of sustainability.govt.nz is scheduled for early 2009, and will be informed by the findings of this testing project.

TARGET AUDIENCE
The Household Sustainability Programme is designed to deliberately target sections of the population who are aware of sustainability issues and are interested in changing their patterns of behaviour.

By accelerating changes of behaviour in our target audience it is expected that they will influence others, who will be “pulled along” with their peer group. Over time, the aim is to influence an increasingly wide section of the population until the majority of households support more sustainable patterns of consumption and behaviour.

Note: further information on the target audience is available on request.

SCOPE
This RFP seeks responses from agencies which are able to provide the following services:

1.Ability to identify and recruit target audience members
2.Website usability testing (based on the target audience’s ability to use the website)
3.Content relevance testing (based on relevance to target audience - may involve a social marketing approach)
4.Evaluation of the findings from this testing project to inform the proposed sustainability.govt.nz refresh

SERVICES REQUIRED
In order to provide a website that meets the needs of our target audience to make sustainable choices in the areas of waste reduction, building, renovating, energy, water efficiency and transport, the Ministry is seeking proposals for carrying out the following services:

1.Design and draft a content relevance and usability testing plan for sustainability.govt.nz (note: a summary of findings from the online user survey is available on request. The full report of results from the online survey will be available to the successful proposal once a contract has been awarded).
2.Contact, recruit and confirm members of the site’s target audience as participants for the testing.
3.Test the content relevance and usability of sustainbiltiy.govt.nz for the target audience.
4.Prepare a summary report of findings from the content relevance and usability testing of sustainbiltiy.govt.nz for the target audience that will inform the proposed refresh scheduled for early 2009.

From: Request for Proposals, For Content relevance and usability testing of sustainability.govt.nz website, NZ Ministry for the Environment

24 September 2008