Ark
Forward – Website for charity tackling addiction, homelessness and unemployment
2021 – ongoing
Forward is a charity empowering people to break the often interlinked cycles of addiction or crime to move forward with their lives.
We were approached by Forward when they were looking for a new partner to work with on the design and build of their new website and to help them improve visual consistency and user journeys across their wider digital estate.
A fresh approach to user needs
Like many organisations, Forward’s service offering had evolved over time in response to organisational priorities, funding opportunities and the needs of its service users. This had resulted in the structure of its previous website becoming confused and editors needing to rely on hacks to facilitate new user journeys.
Forward wanted their new website to not only reflect their current offer, but also provide much greater flexibility for the future.
Involving staff and service users
After an initial discovery phase looking at Forward’s organisational strategy, we kicked off the project with a staff workshop to define a shared vision for the project and to identify and prioritise typical user stories. A particular area of exploration was around the provision of information for the people that used their services and how that should be balanced with content for partners and other audience groups.
The people accessing Forward’s services were at the heart of the project and involved throughout the process, including through initial interviews, reviewing prototypes and testing the website before it went live.
A consistent experience across the digital estate
Our partnership with Forward has enabled them to offer a more consistent experience across their digital platforms and better prioritise the needs of the users of their services. With a more modern design, the new website puts the people they support front and centre, with quick routes into service information through a hero drop-down and service-user focused primary navigation.
Since developing the main website, we’ve worked with Forward to incorporate many of their microsites into the same WordPress Multisite installation. This has provided editors with unified log-in access to all sites as well as a more economical and simplified hosting setup.
Bureau is one of the best agencies I’ve worked with. They led a full website redevelopment that included user testing and design. They really took our project seriously, giving it careful thought and consideration, and best of all, were ready to challenge us and put forward their case when their recommendations differed from our assumptions.