Helping UKAEA simplify and strengthen its digital presence

The United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) is the UK’s national fusion energy research organisation. It is an executive non-departmental public body of the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ).

UKAEA was building a new website to supplement its presence on GOV.UK, and consolidate its wider web estate. It engaged dxw to:

• identify the new website’s structure, functionality, and content requirements
• make recommendations to improve how their web presence satisfies user needs
• recommend a candidate sitemap

The project was to be evidence-based, following best practice such as the Service Manual and Technology Code of Practice, and would feed directly into the scope of works for their tender.

Result

We delivered UKAEA a plan for consolidating 6 separate websites into one. This consolidation will support their strategy, by helping their team:

• present a clear and unified digital presence showing all their work in one place, reinforcing their global reputation
• communicate their work clearly, making it easier for academic, industrial, and governmental stakeholders to engage with UKAEA’s programmes and services
• base this digital presence on a well-structured platform, reducing maintenance overheads and improving operational efficiency

“dxw’s thoughtful work and expertise grounded our internal and external user needs in solid research. That really deepened our understanding of what people look for from our online service and helped us establish effective procurement documentation to secure investment to develop it.”

Simon Darby, UKAEA’s Website Manager

What we did

Evidence-based and user focussed

dxw combined user research, content design, and technical advice, and delivered outputs grounded in evidence.

We placed user voice at the heart of our work:

• conducting interviews with internal and external users to understand their needs and pain points
• engaging with stakeholders via workshops to gather qualitative insights
• using data-driven tools such as Google Analytics to identify high-traffic pages and user behaviour

On the basis of this activity, we validated UKAEA’s list of user stories and drafted both a unified sitemap aligned with user needs and SEO goals, and a set of technical recommendations. This enabled UKAEA to develop a robust statement of requirements for their next phase of work.

Technical exploration

This research was complemented by a technical exploration of the current sites, which presented a set of observations on behalf of content authors and editors, and the technical team that would be responsible for site hosting and maintenance, as well as site visitors. These ranged from publishing workflow to cookie management and privacy, taking in the complexities of content migration, third-party integrations, security, accessibility, and version control along the way.

The exploration deepened UKAEA’s understanding of the ‘whole project’, and drew out areas of implementation and operational risk that the procurement should reflect. These were based on references to GOV.UK Service Manual sections, so staff could be sure they were authoritative.

Working in the open

We showed our working at all stages of the project, with UKAEA’s staff engaged in ‘standup’ meetings to share our progress and our challenges, and involved in our user research interviews and analysis. We shared all these working documents at project’s end, ensuring the internal team had access to the nuance of our work.

Supporting an effective procurement process

Given the purpose of the project, we gave specific thought to our role in the procurement process. Specifically, we had the following recommendations.

• The procurement should ask respondents to consider user needs, rather than requiring specific solutions, following the recommendations of the Service Manual.
• The build project should start validating our draft site map with external users as soon as practicable, to concentrate on the riskiest assumption we’d made in our “Just enough” approach to research.
• Preserve the key baseline requirements from our technical discovery work and underline their importance as factors for respondents to address in their proposals.
• Training should be called out as an important element of the project, as without it the site could suffer from the inconsistent use of page elements by site editors, to the detriment of user experience.