Meet NTcommunity, the app connecting communities with services in NT

The challenges

As there was an existing directory that had been in service for three years before we deployed the NTcommunity website and app, we had three years worth of feedback to factor into our platform development, alongside three years of ideas and improvements we wanted to deploy from our own testing.

The initial brief of the project meant that we had to deal with six standard challenges.

• The first is that the website had to be used by all. That includes community sector workers, remote indigenous communities, people with low literacy, vision disabilities, or learning disabilities.  The site needed to be manageable, accessible, and usable by all.
• Second, the website had to be easily usable on a variety of devices, such as mobiles (even outdated ones), tablets, laptops, and desktops.
• Next, the site had to take its remote community into account. Some people don’t have consistent internet access, so we built an offline sync into the mobile app (something we discovered from the community consultation). Ryan handled the community consultation with their team, allowing Refuel to function as an extension of the NTCOSS team and get the feedback actioned into the new platform.
• As the site was used by organisations across the territory, we needed a solution that reminded these organisations to update their listing and maintain their page. This required us to work closely with the NTCOSS team to capture that community feedback was taken into account when creative, designing, and building their new app and website.
• In addition, if organisations had multiple locations or services, we needed an easy way to administer these services and highlight them.
• We also had to build and create categories and structures so that information across the directory was consistent. The Refuel developers had to create an extensive and largely custom search function for the platform to operate. Before this, the directory used a simple text field based on categories such as location. After deploying our custom search field, users were able to search for what they needed - not an organisation.