So how did we do it?
Ahead of our engagement, multi-supplier teams had worked with Highways England to establish a whole new framework for redeveloping the content. Central to this was two years of hard work by our partners to complete the complex back-end systems. But even with this solid development foundation, we still had tight deadlines and budgets to contend with.
Agile methodologies were our friend here. Distilling our usual UX practices into short but lucrative sprints allowed us to populate our project with collaboration-inducing ceremonies.
We also know that the trick to beating a complex web build is to deconstruct it into manageable, themed pieces of work. We then break them down even further to create a backlog of development tickets. These themes shaped our areas of focus and directly informed our minimum viable product (MVP), and provided a source of truth for our team to work from.
Designing a new, future-proof manual
With our sprints scheduled and MVP defined, we set off on our week-long discovery to understand the current information architecture and usability. We leant on the contacts and expertise within Highways England, and called upon stakeholders and document authors who had rich experience in the DMRB to be our willing test subjects.
As the DMRB also didn’t have a branding repository to draw from, we created wireframed concepts to better understand what branding resonated best with users. These insights formed the basis for our later designs.
We selected a neutral, minimal aesthetic that:
- balanced user and government needs
- exceeded the client’s expectations
- created a strong foundation for future design work.
Development
Alongside conducting user research, we also ran a two-week research and technology discovery. We worked with a third party and relied on their data for the application programming interface (API). Our development team explored potential solutions for DMRB’s tech requirements, and then turned their attention to building an environment ready for our designs.
Our developers ran all DevOps activities, and made use of current technologies like Vue.js/Nuxt to simplify the environment set-ups and release processes within Amazon Web Services (AWS). Our CI/CD process minimised the difference between development and production, resulting in single step and consistently hassle-free deployments.
We then partnered the resulting website with a data studio. This suite of tools came complete with trackable metrics and an analytics dashboard, so the team could continue iterating and improving independently.
Forming a robust foundation for future iterations
By beginning with the fundamentals and incrementally building out functionality, we shared workable code from the start. Coupled with insight-driven designs, we were able to give Highways England a total picture of the project as it progressed. These regular check-in points not only reassured stakeholders through transparency, but captured their expertise, too.
Over the course of our programme of work, we’ve been delighted to see Highways England continue its transformation into an innovative organisation that really champions the user at every step. Where tough timelines and a large design overhaul could have set us back, we instead had enthusiastic and understanding stakeholders who supported this globally relevant project in any way they could.
This was concurred by Steve Davy, Highways England’s Head of Technical Standards, Technical Assurance and Governance Group. When reacting to news of our success at the Highways Awards, he commented: “For me, the sustained collective effort is one of the real stand-out features of all that has been achieved. We hugely appreciate that opportunity.”
Are you facing a similar website redesign?
Whatever your budget or time constraint, we can help you deliver sizeable UX gains for your digital product and your users. Whether you’re building a new product, rebranding or just enhancing, we have almost two decades of experience to guide your organisation into tomorrow, and beyond. Get in touch today, we’d be more than happy to help.