S8080 were commissioned to help Business Wales deliver a very ambitious business support website. We worked closely with them, helping with the agile and cost effective user experience, design and deployment of a comprehensive bilingual open source CMS built in Drupal, all in very demanding time scales. We worked with the Cabinet Office GDS (Government Digital Service) initially on the overall approach for the project.
We delivered on time and on budget and the website continues to develop, becoming what is one of the world’s most comprehensive and engaging business information, guidance and advice websites.
What we did to help
- The project’s stakeholder requirements gathering and user experience phase included alignment sessions, workshops with the core team, workshop sessions with 26 stakeholders, IA workshop session
- We undertook in-depth face to face end-user interviews to understand end user needs and wants
- We developed detailed personas and defined user journeys
- A detailed content audit and peer review fed into the evolution of the information architecture and identification of key user journeys
- Detailed wireframing then took place to define the user experience and detail the functional requirements, including links to 3rd party systems
- Our creative team undertook a creative briefing workshop, developed the digital creative brief and then designed key pages which were presented to the EST Senior Management Team and the Minister
- Welsh language pages were designed
- Our front end tech team worked on the build of accessible web standards compliant templates were developed in English and Welsh
- Our front and back end development teams worked on open source CMS system integration, theming, customisation and tiered-editorial workflow
- Search and forms were built and the bilingual provision developed along with integration into third party systems
- Content migration of English and Welsh content from existing site
- Setup of hosting, deployment, QA and Testing, system hardening, highly proactive project management and detailed planning by S8080 and ETS meant that despite the almost impossible deadline, the site was released on time, in budget with excellent feedback from the Ministerial Department, wider Welsh Government, external stakeholders and end users
Why not take a look at the site: https://businesswales.gov.wales/
The team has enjoyed working with S8080 and the new Business site has exceeded expectations
