Paul Seys

Brief

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) is responsible for the UK’s business growth and lies at the heart of government.  It aims to create an enterprise culture where everyone with talent is inspired to turn ideas into successful enterprises and get rid of unnecessary barriers that can stifle growth.

BIS was formed in June 2009 when the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) were merged. The new organisation, which had a much wider brief, and as a result of the merger faced a number of business issues relating to their website and the way in which they communicated with their customers online.

The aim of the project was to; create a more intuitive site which was less ‘click hungry’ and had a flatter structure, to combine existing content from three separate websites, and provide a platform for its partner organisations to use that would save them money.

With Eduserv chosen as development partner Redweb headed up the definition of the user experience and design.  My role was to carry out all initial research and stakeholder engagement and to wireframe a potential solution. Further to this I developed an initial interpretation of the design to show a possible treatment to help guide the visual designers.

Outcome

The resulting website was a great success. The merger of the 3 (which our Information Architecture had to accommodate), enabled them to better serve their users and delivered savings to BIS and its partners of around £2.8 million over four years.

The site was also voted Sitecore Site of the Year in 2010. The criteria the award was based on included; creativity in presentation, integration with rich data sources and applications, ability to educate, inform and motivate to action, and the compelling nature of the overall user experience.

Honours & Awards