Royal Yachting Association

Our remit was to bring a new design and structure for the RYA's website. The RYA is well-known for its training courses, as an authoritative provider of information & legal issues, and is an internationally renowned marine publisher.

How big is this site? We printed a sitemap document for a presentation. It was 7 feet wide and 3 feet tall!

The old site was poorly organised, with a huge amount of content spread across many websites. Our user research showed that pretty much everyone was frustrated with the old site. We employed a user-centred design approach to guide the project (a large undertaking in itself given the wide range of user types) to ensure that the new structure worked well for everyone. The online shop was also very difficult to use, so we redesigned to make it familiar, usable and profitable.

We worked with the Marketing manager and internal departments to present the right message in the right way. Many programmes with their own brands and directions that need to be properly represented. We also worked with the RYA in defining the advertising requirements with their publishing agency.

Working under the guidance of the internal technical team at the RYA, we reworked the complete Information Architecture to provide the best possible user experience. The workflow started at Design Haus, defining user journeys, creating key wireframes then finally the design and HTML which was then jointly implemented by us and the RYA internal team.

It takes time to move this much content, so our work with representatives from departments and teams to bring them on board was essential - fostering a spirit of engagement from an early point to ensure that everyone with an interest in the website can see the rationale for the change.

The design brief for this project included a new theme throughout, with branded variations for the specific sections which tie the main RYA brand together with the livery for the sub-brand. We established the design considerations at the wireframe stage, such as optimising the homepage for the balance between user needs and commercial constraint. Our design team prepared a theme based on a calm night scene, which gives a modern nautical vocabulary to the layout, with many variations for the content.