NZTE – Website redesign – SAM SCHREY DIGITAL

NZTE - website redesign

NZTE required a new website as their existing site wasn’t working well for them.
From the user’s perspective it was difficult to find relevant information about the organisation and a bad user experience. Within the organisation itself it was difficult for content loaders to manage the website and load content without errors and broken pages.

I worked closely with the product owner and multiple stakeholders across different departments to deliver a design solution that aligned with their business roadmap and audience requirements.

NZTE is made up of five audiences: Working with NZTE, Export assistance, Investor assistance (Raising capital, Investors) and doing business with New Zealand. The brief was initially to have five separate websites however I recommend to house all five offerings in one place with a mobile first solution.

I recommended the backend architecture utilise the headless CMS system Contentful that was being used for their new customer portal and house the new website content as well. This was to enable content loaders to be able cross content share for efficiency and take advantage of Contentfuls modular build system so page building was flexible and easy.

In terms of look and feel I worked with the existing above the line branding and translated that into a digital setting.

NZTE required a new website as their existing site wasn’t working well for them.
From the user’s perspective it was difficult to find relevant information about the organisation and a bad user experience. Within the organisation itself it was difficult for content loaders to manage the website and load content without errors and broken pages.

I worked closely with the product owner and multiple stakeholders across different departments to deliver a design solution that aligned with their business roadmap and audience requirements.

Role Lead UX Designer

Year 2020

Agency 18 month Contract role

Client NZTE

Solution

I did an audit of the existing website and recognised the pain points and using existing personas I was able to identify what needed to change and how to organise / plan the information architecture.

I proposed a new sitemap, userflow, site architecture and worked closely with the website product owner. Once stakeholders were happy with the plan I then created interactive wireframes of how the website and navigation was going to work and tested them with stakeholders and relevant audiences.

Once testing was validated, I planned the information architecture of the CMS and alongside backend developers, we designed the best solution for content modules within the Contentful CMS system. The goal was to make this website easy for user to navigate and find relevant information and for content managers to easily load content and produce nicely designed pages.

I designed the UI to reflect the above the line branding and created a colour system so users could find relevant information by visually connecting what colour section they were in.

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CMS Modules

Thirty CMS content modules were planned and designed to sit in the contentful CMS system. I worked closely alongside backend developers to brief and test each component. Each module has multiple functionality so content loaders had a flexible system to build content on a page. The UI was flexible with browsers so it would display differently for mobile vs tablet vs web.

Colour design system

The colour design system represented each audience. Working with NZTE = Black, Export assistance = Peach, Investor assistance = Aqua. The idea behind this was to use a clear visual cue for the audience to know where they were on the site as there was so much information to navigate.

Digital brand guidelines

I worked alongside another ux designer to create extensive brand guidelines that helped the organisation and content loaders understand how the UI design was applied and how to use the modules within the CMS.

Sam Schrey, Auckland, New Zealand. email [email protected]