The Education and Training Foundation is a government funded initiative launched in August 2013. The Foundation offers a range of opportunities for independent training providers, colleges, employers and community learning organisations to work as part of its programme to enhance professionalism and standards in the education and skills sector. As part of its launch the foundation created a tactical solution website built on Joomla CMS and internally managed.

The task was to design a website to be the prime external presentation and communications platform of the Foundation. The website would provide an active space for exchanging thoughts and ideas that would support the advancement of the Education and Training sector. It should present a professional and modern ‘face’ to all stakeholders, enabling them to access and proactively engage with the supplied content. The site would promote the services of the Foundation, as well as providing opportunities to work for and with the Foundation, including tendering opportunities.

As part of the discovery phase, I began by conducting a heuristic evaluation of the site to identify any issues with the tactical solution and to familiarise myself with the content. It soon became evident that the content was poorly organised with plenty of irrelevant material and an overly corporate presentation. It also returned a low score in Fleisch Kincaid readability tests.

I carried out high level peer reviews of similar sites in the sector to establish a benchmark for the new site. Next, I conducted user research in the form of telephone interviews with 10 users. The findings supplied qualitative data used to feed into personas and user journeys. Three personas were created and used to inform any further requirements and design decisions.

Once the business and user requirements were identified, I set about organising the content using card sorting techniques in collaboration with a client representative. From this, the information architecture was created in the form of a site map , which was then reviewed and refined with the client. Wireframes were created and populated with content which informed the information architecture further. Rationalisation of content was made were appropriate. A small number of design reviews of the prototype and wireframes were held before the branding and visual design were applied. The full discovery and design phase lasted 24 days - as planned.

Customer Feedback" The site is looking fantastic and all the feedback so far has been extremely positive. Many thanks for producing such a brilliant resource both for the Foundation and the sector. We had almost 900 visitors on the first day. That's more than three times the number we usually receive. And two months on from launch, the visits are still up significantly."
Lindsay Wright
Head of Communications and Stakeholder Engagement Education and Training Foundation.

Whitebaord to sketch to wires to mocks. Apologies for naff drop shadows ;)

Creating the IA and sitemap

Responsive wireframes

Personas that I created created for the project after telephone interviews with users

Recommendation

Darren Bond  —  . Digital Strategy Director at Coast Digital

"Rick is an absolute pleasure to work with. He brings a wealth of experience to projects and can apply a wide range of user experience skills and techniques. He is proactive and delivered above and beyond expectations on projects worked on. All of this, while being a lovely chap as well. He managed to build an excellent rapport with the customers he worked with and helped shape their solution so that it pleased all stakeholders in the project first time around. I look forward to working with him again in the future."