Sport England
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.
Visit Sport England.
THE PROJECT
My role
UX designer – Covering the full UX process
The team
UX Designer, Project Manager, Visual Designer, Back-end Developer, Front-end Developer, SEO Analyst, QA Analyst, DevOps Engineer, Account Manager
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 platform for their funding applications, the research they carry out, and to clearly communicate their mission and strategy.
The project challenges were:
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Re-designing a very content heavy website.
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The consolidation of multiple websites.
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To define the personas of an organisation with a wide range of varied users.
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To carry out a thorough content audit on a content heavy website.
HOW WE DID IT
Research
01 / Workshop with 16 participants
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.
02 / Stakeholder interviews with 10 participants
Following the workshop 10 internal stakeholder interviews were conducted to dig deeper into the project goals on a one-to-one bases.
03 / User research with 14 participants
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.
04 / Content audit
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.
05 / User journeys
The key user journeys were mapped out to get a deeper understanding of the users, their pain-points and the opportunities for improvement.
Define
06 / Personas
User interview analysis lead to defining three primary and two secondary personas.
The three primary persons were:
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The Advocate – professionals that support Sport England’s strategy, making decisions and developing policies.
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The Facilitator – professionals that apply the local strategy. They act as the bridge between the Advocate and Implementor e.g. helping clubs secure funding.
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The Implementor – professionals that provide sports or activities to the general public. They are less involved with the national strategy.
The secondary personas were:
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Internal Sport England stakeholders
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MPs
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Journalists
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Job seekers
The secondary personas were individuals looking for information, they want to know about the work of Sport England is doing, its campaigns, research and data.
07 / Information Architecture
The IA was developed and defined alongside the content mapping task in an iterative process.
09 / Content mapping and content strategy
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.
Designing
10 / Wireframing
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.
11 / Prototyping
During each sprint, the wireframes were turned into prototypes ready for testing.
Validating
12 / User testing with 19 participants
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.
13 / And finally
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.
THE FINAL SOLUTION
Final takeaways
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To have success in a project an in-depth user research needs to be prioritised, knowing the users is the key to informed and confident problem solving and decision making.
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There are no short cuts in carrying out a content audit, it’s a long and boring job, but it needs to be done, and it needs to be completed thoroughly.
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Building a good professional relationship with the clients, and getting the main stakeholders involved and onboard from the start can be invaluable to the success of a project.
Thank you for reading my Sport England case study.
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