Design Council
Ethnographic research and iterative design helped the Design Council to understand their users' needs.
"Flow focused on the real end users by visiting and talking with them to understand their needs and expectations. This provided both a short-term improvement to our current site, and the foundations for a radical rethink of the Design Council's online future."
- Jocelyn Hillman, Publishing Manager, Design Council
The brief: Help the Design Council to understand its online users and build a site that encourages good design.
The Design Council is the UK's national authority on design. Their remit is to promote the value of design and help designers and businesses to improve design practice.
In 2001, the Design Council approached Flow for help with research and design for their new website. They wanted to:
- Get to know their target users and find out what they wanted from the site.
- Design a new structure for the site that addressed user needs effectively, and promoted the Design Council's public agenda.
We did research with users and stakeholders followed by iterative design and testing.
We began with contextual research - visiting people from the key areas of business, education and government in their own work environments. This allowed us to understand their work and their needs, and observe how they use the Design Council site.
Among other findings, this research revealed that:
- Users were 'time poor' and needed concise, well-structured information.
- They wanted more information about the Design Council projects than policy allowed at the time.
We went on to conduct interviews with Design Council staff to help us understand the range of ideas and aspirations for the new site.
Following our research, there were four main stages to designing the architecture for the new site:
- Analysing the findings of the context study to identify the goals that users most needed the site to address, and developing a list of tasks that users needed to be able to carry out.
- Developing a wire frame prototype based on the ideal content areas and sample tasks.
- User testing the prototype on 10 people matching the target profile to uncover potential problems and find solutions.
- Refining the architecture based on the findings of the usability tests.
We delivered annotated wireframe prototypes ready for graphic design and implementation.
We created a website that helped users expand their understanding of the Design Council and of design.
"After Flow performed the initial research, they took this fresh understanding of the requirements to the next level. This new architecture they created really helped us to start talking about the structure of our online communication."
- Jocelyn Hillman, Publishing Manager, Design Council
