Bringing government closer: redesign of a public agency’s website
Changing the focus from organisation to public.
A government website isn’t just about information–it’s about helping people. Hired as a webmaster to modernize and redevelop a government agency’s public-facing website, I recognized an opportunity to go beyond graphics and technical implementation. Applying a user-centred approach throughout the project, I focused the redesign around the needs of vulnerable youth, parents, and social workers. The research challenged many of the agency’s existing assumptions about its users.
Context
The Flemish Agency for Youth Welfare was a government organisation dedicated to supporting at-risk minors, whether they faced domestic challenges or legal difficulties.
Hired as their webmaster with a redesign on the horizon, I quickly saw that the problems ran deeper than outdated visuals. The website was difficult to read, hard to navigate, and built around how the agency thought about itself rather than how its users needed to find help.
Challenge
The website’s problems were interconnected. Dense blocks of small text made content visually inaccessible. A structure built around internal departments rather than user needs made information hard to find. And the language throughout reflected how the agency described itself, not how its three audiences actually thought or spoke. A teenager in crisis, a worried parent, and a trained social worker have little in common beyond needing the same website to work for them.
Mobile responsiveness was a further gap. Smartphones were becoming mainstream, and a redesign that ignored them would be outdated before it launched.
Approach
Analysis and research
I started with the analytics. Traffic patterns revealed a clear mismatch: the content the agency considered most important was not what visitors were actually looking for. It was an early signal that the website was organised around internal priorities rather than user needs. The card sorting sessions would later show exactly why.
The three core user groups — vulnerable youth, parents, and youth welfare professionals — were known to the agency, but had never been used as an organising principle for the website. Making them explicit became the foundation for everything that followed.
I organised workshops with representatives from each target group, as well as with agency stakeholders. One exercise explored how users perceived the agency itself. The results were more revealing than the agency expected, and reinforced how large the gap was between how the organisation saw itself and how its users experienced it.
But the most significant finding came from the card sorting sessions. When asked to group and label content themselves, users organised it in ways that had little to do with the agency’s internal structure. Labels that made perfect sense to staff meant nothing to a parent seeking guidance or a teenager looking for help. The website wasn’t just hard to navigate. It was speaking a language its users didn’t recognise.
From there, the information architecture was rebuilt around the three audiences rather than the agency’s internal departments. Card sorting and tree testing shaped a navigation structure that reflected how users actually thought about the content, not how the agency had always organised it. The homepage itself became the clearest expression of this shift: three distinct pathways, one for each audience, replacing a news-heavy layout that had served no one in particular.
Implementation
Working within the agency's visual guidelines, I introduced clearer typographic hierarchy and more breathing room to make dense content readable. For an audience that included young people with low literacy, visual clarity wasn't cosmetic. It was functional. The redesign was built mobile-first from the start, treating responsiveness as a core requirement rather than an afterthought.
I worked iteratively, starting with paper prototypes to validate the structure before moving to digital. Feedback came primarily from stakeholders and internal reviews rather than formal usability sessions. One exception stood out: a colleague with a severe visual impairment became an informal but invaluable accessibility tester throughout the project.
Outcomes
The before and after screenshots tell much of the story. A text-heavy, news-focused homepage with no clear entry points became a clean, audience-first layout with three distinct pathways for the people who actually needed the site.
Beyond the visual shift, the underlying structure changed fundamentally. Content previously buried under departmental labels became findable under language users actually recognised. The site worked on mobile. And for the first time, the agency had a digital presence organised around its users rather than itself.
Reflections
Looking back, the process was solid for its context. If I ran it today, I would push harder for a round of testing with real users before launch rather than relying on stakeholder feedback alone.
The most interesting challenge throughout was navigating the tension between institutional constraints and user needs. A government agency has rules, legal obligations, and a brand to protect. It also has people who depend on it. Finding the space where both can be served honestly was the real design problem.