Background

Sunderland Business Partnership is an organisation that brings together businesses across Sunderland to collaborate, network and share knowledge. The organisation had a website that would post news and information on behalf of the partners. The partner would email and the team would post the information on their behalf.

As the partnership got bigger, this approach was becoming more and more time consuming. The organisation needed a website that would allow partners to add to the website themselves.

The problem

The current site created a lot of admin for the organisation, managing content from a growing number of new partners.The new site needed to balance partners ability to add content to the website, but for the team to have editorial control.

Process

To begin the project, I spoke to stakeholders to understand what they wanted from the new site, how content was submitted currently and what level of control was required. It was quickly discovered that there was a need for multiple account types.The solution needed to support:

• Partner accounts that could submit content directly
• Affiliate accounts with restricted access, allowing posts on behalf of partners
• Notifications to alert the organisation when content was submitted
• An approval step before content appeared on the live site
• A private, members-only area for meeting notes and shared resources

After defining these requirements I moved onto wireframing, focusing on the key user flows for content submission, moderation and approval. As there was a limited budget, testing was carried out using non-interactive wireframes with a small number of users along with constant feedback from stakeholder.

After a few small tweaks to the wireframes after testing, I moved onto designing the site. A key area to focus on was the different user accounts to ensure that the user journey was simple and easy to process through.

The build included a public facing directory of partners that automatically populated based on user account types, reducing the need for manual updates.

Outcomes

The new website massively reduced the time and effort that the organisation spent managing partner content. Partners were able to submit their content themselves or allow an affiliate to post on their behalf but with clearly defined limits. The organisation retained full control over the site and could approve or request changes to content that was posted.

The project delivered a practical solution that transformed the website into a collaborative platform while maintaining full control of content that was posted.