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The Environment Minister The Hon. Peter Garrett has just announced the launch of a new government website: LivingGreener.gov.au. It centralises a lot of government information available on living more sustainably, especially information about rebates, grants and loans available.

LivingGreener.gov.au home page

There’s been a tonne of work involved in getting this website live, and the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts has done a brilliant job at researching and listening to the target audiences to deliver something that anyone and everyone can use.

I was involved as Senior Consultant at PTG Global with the user experience design for LivingGreener, including:

• Personas and want maps design based on user research, website traffic analysis and statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics
• Information architecture, including an overall conceptual model based on leading people at whatever point they were at, on a journey towards being more active to live more sustainably
• User interface design, with wireframes and prototypes and working with content writers to structure content to integrate action points throughout the website

This has been a really rewarding project to work on. One reason is that this website isn’t trying to be everything ‘environmental’ to everyone; it’s focused squarely on guiding people towards the government assistance available to help everyone do more for the environment. And that’s got to be a good thing.

This is only the launched version of the website too; there’s more content and functionality in the wings that will be rolled out – to borrow a phrase from the Prime Minister – in due season.

So take a look: livinggreener.gov.au, and here’s the official press release, too. What do you think? What are some ways you think a website can motivate you to do more for the environment?