Creating clarity from conflict

The team at Te Mana Whakaatu –Classification Office (CO) are responsible for rating films, TV shows, and a range of other media. In some instances they even ban content  altogether – for instance, the recording of the March 15 Mosque attacks. Their goal is to preserve freedom of expression whilst keeping New Zealanders safe. This is a tricky balance and often subtle nuance makes all the difference in the decision outcome.

Over the past few years CO have become more consumer facing and recently had a brand refresh to reflect this. The CMS on the current website was also difficult to manage and needed an overhaul. Plus, new legislative requirements meant that CO now needed to make ratings data accessible to the general public and streaming providers. CO needed a new website that ticked all these boxes and supported their new brand story.

Together we identified our key audiences which enabled us to plan, refine, and structure the content in a way that makes it easy for people to digest. We worked closely to refine the way CO describes themselves and what they do on the site. Careful thought goes into each classification decision, so we made the decision to bring quick-takes/find a rating to the front and centre. Through ‘featured decisions’ we came up with an informative and engaging way to understand why a classification decision was made, and what the CO does.

There is a careful gradation and balance behind each classification decision, we used the secondary colour palette to produce a set of gradients that encapsulates this idea. We also chose to display the decision summaries (quick-takes) in a dark mode, visually referencing the entertainment vibe of streaming platforms and in turn drawing attention to the relevance of the role that the CO plays in everyday life.

We settled on a (pure SQL) solution that could be run on their existing infrastructure with the aim of minimising the hands-on time that the staff would need to spend generating the ratings data, and make maximum use of the systems they already had. We built this collaboratively with CO staff so we could best suit their needs so they can effectively manage the data. The new website was built for speed, using a modern CMS (Wagtail), as well as a modern architecture stack. The site makes  full use of a content delivery network (CDN) (AWS CloudFront). All of this meant the site went from average 1.4s load to ~0.5s when we deployed.

So many little decisions and changes together both from a design and build perspective have made a big difference. The result speaks for itself and we are delighted to be working alongside the Classification Office as a strategic and build partner to make ongoing improvements together.
https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/