The problem
Functionality had accumulated piecemeal, section by section, for four years. Start-ups and growing businesses were served the same undifferentiated site, and neither found what they came for.
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Case study · Business Gateway
A site that had outgrown its own structure.
Four years of features added section by section, never across the platform. The redevelopment separated the two audiences the site had been trying to serve at once, and gave each of them a path.
At a glance
If you read nothing else · 40 seconds
What I did
Lean and agile: research into a structural argument, co-creation workshops, wireframes before visual design, then two UX, two design and four development sprints.
What changed
An architecture that separates start-up from growth, a tool that tailors content to your stage, sector and place, and a WAI ‘A’ rating.
Why it needed rebuilding
The site had performed well for four years. That was the problem. New functionality and content had been added steadily and successfully, but always into individual areas — never across the platform. Each addition made sense on its own and the whole made steadily less sense together.
What was left was a structure that had grown rather than been designed: two very different audiences moving through one undifferentiated site, help sitting behind gates, and local offices running as separate micro-sites outside the thing they belonged to. Adding one more section would not have fixed it.
What the research found
Four areas · open one to read the detail
Growth businessesHigh impact+
What the research showed
- Perceived Business Gateway as a business generalist, not a specialist
- Wanted a tailored service from people who understood their sector
- Highly self-reliant and unused to asking outside services for help
- Sought directional information: market reports, research, sector data
What we changed
- A dedicated Your Sector area serving industry-specific content
- Market reports and research services surfaced, not buried under Services
- Specialist framing rather than general business advice
Start-upsMedium+
What the research showed
- Looking for help, advice, networking and best practice
- Actionable 'how to' content had performed well on the old site
- Time-poor, and wanting content brought to them rather than searched for
What we changed
- More actionable how-to guides
- Popular guides served straight from the gateway
- A personalisation tool that returns what applies to you
Content and gatingHigh impact+
What the research showed
- Content sat behind gates that blocked the people it was written for
- Guides were buried in a rigid hierarchy
- Tone did not match an audience that needed motivating
What we changed
- Gated content removed
- Filters in place of hierarchical navigation
- Industry experts brought in for real case studies and advice
- An inspiring, motivating tone of voice
Local officesHigh impact+
What the research showed
- Local offices ran as exterior micro-sites, outside the main experience
- Users responding to an advert landed somewhere disconnected from the offering
What we changed
- Local offices fully integrated into the main site
- Case studies and inspiration grouped under a new Success Stories gateway
A new information architecture
The structural decision the rest depended on
- Split by what the user is doing, not by what the organisation offers.Starting up and running a business became the top-level division inside Online Resources.
- Group the proof.Case studies and inspiration stories were scattered. Success Stories gave them one home and made them findable.
- Add Your Sector.The answer to growth businesses seeing Business Gateway as a generalist: content specific to the industry you actually operate in.
- Bring the local offices inside.They had been exterior micro-sites. Integrating them meant an advert could land someone somewhere connected to the rest of the offering.
From wireframe to build
Homepage · paper first, then pixels
The tailored tool
Three questions, then only what applies to you
The audience research kept returning the same two things: people were time-poor, and they wanted content that already knew something about them. A tool that asks three optional questions — what stage your business is at, what sector it is in, where you are based — and returns only the resources, events and reports that match was the most direct answer to both.
I kept it short, optional and in plain language. It is the piece of the project I would point at first: the research said time-poor, and the tool is what time-poor looks like when you design for it.
How the work ran
Select a step
01 · Review
Four years of additions had been made section by section, never across the platform. The review made the pattern legible: the site was serving a start-up and a growing business the same undifferentiated experience, and neither was finding what they came for.
What it did
Measured against the previous site
392%Rise in market report downloads after the path was redesigned
85%Completed the tailored tool and clicked a resource it returned
20.5%More goals completed on site than before
23%Rise in pages per session on mobile, with bounce rate down
Across all devices, pages per session rose from 3.81 to 4.05. The site was delivered to a WAI ‘A’ rating, with passes against many AA and AAA criteria.
What I would do differently
We worked at pace and co-created with the client, and the budget left very little room for formal user testing. Not being able to validate with real users feels like fumbling in the dark, and I would rather iterate against evidence than against consensus.
What made it work anyway was that we were not designing in silo: the client held a great deal of user insight, and that sat on top of the UX review and the audience research already done. The performance numbers bear that out. But co-creation is a substitute for testing, not an equivalent, and I would fight harder for the testing budget now.
The other unfinished piece is accessibility. WAI ‘A’ with many AA and AAA passes is a good place to launch from and the wrong place to stop. Reducing the number of PDFs and closing the gap to full AA compliance was the work I wanted to carry into the next phase.
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