Reboot the Future – UX Website Co-Design

Cynergy were commissioned to design a new website platform on behalf of the Reboot the Future charity. At the time, they were in the process of finalising a new brand and were already working with a developer to build the new website. With just a four-week lead time, we set about working with the Reboot team to understand what exactly their needs and requirements were at this stage.

From our initial discussions with the team, we understood that the website was going to be the first application of new Reboot the Future brand anywhere, and so we needed to work closely with the Reboot team, their developer and other agencies involved to ensure that we were able to bring the brand to life through UX web design.

As a first step, we designed and delivered a virtual bespoke user workshop via Microsoft Teams and Miro, to ascertain their vision and ambitions. In this workshop we also explored any pain points that were on the existing website so that we could look to mitigate them on the new website, as well as delving into the core stakeholders and different user profiles and personas so we could understand what their needs and motivations were for visiting the website.

We used the outputs from the session to help us create a high-level site map and a set of wire frames, which we then designed into a set of user tasks to understand how users navigate the prototype and if they could find content easily within the suggested new site structure. Each task was created by looking at the website goals and pain points discovered from the user workshop. These were then shared and completed by the Reboot team and their stakeholders (around 30 participants) to test the proposed approach. We then tracked user movements and generated click heatmaps.

A User Testing Report was then created to outline our findings. The user testing tasks had a pleasing success rate, and the proposed website structure and wireframe had an average rating of 4-5 for usability. However, we also gained very insightful feedback on ways we could further improve the website’s design and navigation, e.g. making it easier to find the Campaigns section.

Following this, we then created homepage concepts using the new branding for feedback from the Reboot team. Once they had agreed on a concept to go forward with, we incorporated any feedback and created the website designs for the key pages using Figma. This allowed for quick and easy handoff to the developer.

Whilst we were undertaking the co-design process, the brand design was being finalised. An introduction call with the agency who were undertaking this was set up to discuss the brand assets, guidelines and we had the opportunity to share how we would interpret the vision of the brand to bring it all to life using our own expertise and experience of branding.

The Reboot team wanted a bold and impactful website, which immediately grabbed the users attention. We achieved this through the positioning of an animated narrative, leading straight into a campaign video. We used the new colour palette to add emphasis to key areas of the site and to draw the user into the content. The language in the menu was very carefully curated to enable users to understand where content sat, but that was impactful and met the tone and messaging that had been set in the brand guidelines. We also used interactivity across the site to add further interest and engagement for the user, which also supported their journey through the content.