Full website redesign for DesignSpark

What our client wanted

DesignSpark wanted to redesign their website to ensure it was meeting the needs of their target audience and to attract Professional Engineers and Students. Their main requirements included:

• Reviewing and redesigning the structure of the website
• Having a set of user centred prototypes that were tested with their users and could be developed by DesignSpark’s development agency.

What we delivered

• A background review to understand the current site, its audiences and its competitors, and to review previous research with users that had been carried out on the site.
• A stakeholder workshop to help uncover the business requirements for the new site.
• Experience maps to help understand, and focus on, the new target audiences for the site.
• A content audit was undertaken to prioritise and examine the organisation of the existing site’s content and analyse key relationships within it. It also became a base for the new information architecture.
• A new information architecture was produced and iterated upon following face to face moderated and remote unmoderated tree testing with real users of the website.
• 4 x design sprints in which wireframes were produced and turned into interactive prototypes. These were then usability tested in Bunnyfoot’s UX labs in London and Sheffield using participants recruited by Bunnyfield. The designs were iterated upon based on the findings in each sprint.

Although Bunnyfoot came in to this work not knowing our target audience, they quickly gained a really good understanding which really helped shape the work on our wireframes. We performed user testing in several locations which gave us a good cross section of users which was all arranged through the Bunnyfoot team for the end of each sprint. Overall, it was a pleasure to work with the team at Bunnyfoot who we found to be very professional and gave a fresh perspective on our requirements and how we could achieve our goals.

David Cole
Product Owner, Designspark

The results

• Participants were able to quickly understand what the site offered and who it was aimed at, whereas previous testing on the existing site found this to be a major issue.
• Testing with users helped highlight the need for more clarity around the navigation labels as there were some pieces of content that participants felt could sit under multiple headings.
• Participants helped to identify features for various new components that would help them improve their workflow on projects.

This was DesignSpark’s first experience of running a full User Centred Design project and it gave them valuable insight into the requirements of their users as well as iterating and validating the new design without the expense of changes during the build process.