CLIENT
NFER
MY ROLE INVOLVED
UX Design
UI Design
Front-end Development
SUMMARY
As part of a project where I was asked to look into resolving issues with the newly built website by an external agency, I took it upon myself to investigate what the pain points are with the homepage and to produce a concept to the management before my contract finished.
PROBLEM STATEMENT
The NFER website was entirely rebuilt and redesigned by an external agency a few months before my contract had started there. The website unfortunately had some issues which needed resolving by way of collaboration between myself and the external agency. The homepage had several issues and I saw it as a bit of a missed opportunity. Seeing as the website platform was Umbraco (the same as the platform used for CHAMP Cargosystems) and I had some experience of it, I felt confident that I could achieve a working prototype on the UAT website for presentation.
PROJECT GOALS
- Identify the design and technical issues residing on the homepage
- Freshen up the design, while retaining the ability to use the same back-end HTML
- Produce a working CMS template file which can show the functionality on the UAT website
RESEARCH METHODS
HOMEPAGE ISSUES
KEY LEARNINGS
Lacks personality
Clunky appearance and order of content - feels very 'out the box'.
Legacy coding bugs
Coding bugs have been left on the page to help disorientate users further.
Usability issues
Not a great deal of thought has been put into how users would interact with various page elements, eg the News section.
Re-ordering of page elements is needed
Products section has been placed at the bottom of the page - red flag, given that it's a revenue-generating section.
CONCEPT
CONCLUSION
Time constraints within the contract duration didn't allow for much in the way of wireframes and a general consultation period with stakeholders, so what I did was create a duplicate set up of the homepage in a test environment and create the best compromise of design improvements vs minimal code changes in order to reduce risk and downtime. Above is what I was able to produce live on the Umbraco platform. The management were impressed with the concept, but sadly it didn't make it into production because of lack of resource to maintain and manage it going forward, as well as budget constraints meaning that my contract was due to expire.