Sport England

Defining the audience

B2B or B2C?

After a kick off workshop and after speaking to the main stakeholders, it became clear that a big problem was that the current website was trying to speak to too many audiences without a proper logic behind it.

We needed to identify our audience and their needs.

One of the first decisions was to understand whether the website should have been B2C or B2B, or both.

I wrote a research strategy plan which included interviews to:

• Sport England employees
• current and potential partners
• people who previously applied for grants or who could do it in future
• general public

Following this research, it became clear that Sport England needed to focus on B2B communication only, and redirect general public to the relevant satellite websites.

Identifying personas

However, even reducing the communication to “only” B2B, this still meant addressing a wide range of different organisations and businesses.

To be able to build a solid content strategy, we needed to identify personas.

Analysing the needs, goals and motivations of the B2B audience, I was able to identify 3 primary personas:

• Advocate – professionals that support Sport England’s strategy, making decisions and developing policies.
• Facilitator – professionals that apply the local strategy, acting as the bridge between the Advocate and Implementor.
• Implementer – professionals that provide sports or activities to the general public, less involved with the national strategy.

Content strategy

The biggest challenge: the content

Now that we had the personas, we could move onto the most challenging aspect of this project: the amount of content we had to deal with.

To make sure that the new website would support a better IA, I set up the following strategy:

• The client hired some copywriters. My team and I then worked closely with them to avoid a gap between content and design
• I audited the current content to analyse where the main issues were
• I set up and tested (with online tree testing) a first high level sitemap, which we would have refined during each sprint rather than setting it in stone from the beginning
• I worked closely with the marketing team to optimise the SEO

Design & iterate

Designing & iterating

Once we had a rough idea of the general structure of the website, we started to design and implement parts of it through Agile sprints.

In each sprint:

• we designed a specific part of the website (which we had previously prioritised) meeting AA accessibility standards
• we tested it with real or potential users
• we iterated the design and refined/changed the IA for that part of the website

While designing I also made sure that we would reuse the same components as much as possible.

Building the design system

Working closely with the visual designer, we also created a design system with all the components used across the website.

To create it we used atomic design principles.

The result

One year after launch, the redesigned website had achieved a 613% increase in overall traffic and a 1000% increase in mobile traffic.

Testimonials