Sport England is a public body building the foundations of a community sport system by working with national governing bodies of sport, and other partners, to grow the number of people becoming more active; and help talented individuals from all diverse backgrounds excel.
This was a project utilising the UX process to re-design a government body content heavy website. The project was to consolidate Sport England’s multiple websites into one to provide the user-centred platform for their funding applications, the research they carry out, and to clearly communicate their mission and strategy.
UX Designer – Leading the research and discovery phase
UX Designer, Project Manager, Visual Designer, Back-end Developer, Front-end Developer, SEO Analyst, QA Analyst, DevOps Engineer, Account Manager
The project was kicked off by an internal stakeholder workshop with 16 participants over two days, the workshop consisted of tasks and activities to define the problem, outline the project goals and risks. During the workshop the users were discussed and initial proto-personas defined. The workshop was also used as an opportunity to get all stakeholders buy in from the outset.
Following the workshop 10 internal stakeholder interviews were conducted to dig deeper into the project goals on a one-to-one bases.
In collaboration with the Sport England team, a mix of 14 users were identified, in-depth user interviews were conducted to better understand the users, their needs and pain-points, and to define the user groups.
A full content audit of the website was carried out. Looking at over 1000 URLs (and the data) to make decisions on the quality of each page and to whether keep, merge or delete it.
The key user journeys were mapped out to get a deeper understanding of the users, their pain-points and the opportunities for improvement.
User interview analysis lead to defining three primary and two secondary personas.The three primary persons were:
The secondary personas were:
The IA was developed and defined alongside the content mapping task in an iterative process.
A content mapping exercise was carried out during the IA development and wireframing stages, making decisions on content types based on user needs. This followed the development of a content strategy and content creation.
The wireframing was completed over 5 sprints, the focus for each sprint was a different section of the website, starting by the ‘funding’ section as it was identified as the most important part of the project.
Over 60 wireframes were created for three breakpoints ensuring the designs will be fully responsive, and with accessibility fully in mind.
During each sprint, the wireframes were turned into prototypes ready for testing.
Moderated in-depth usability tests were carried out in a number of rounds with 19 participants. After each round the designs iterated and presented to the clients.
The final part of my role was to write the user stories, the functional specification, the handover to the development team, and being on stand by during the development phase to answer any questions.