Rail Delivery Group

Client

Rail Delivery Group

Area

Application development / Design

The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) is the British rail industry membership body that brings together passenger and freight rail companies, Network Rail and High Speed 2.

It brings together the companies that run Britain’s railway into a single team with one goal - to deliver a better railway for you and your community.

The Breif

To redesign the RDG website to be more visually engaging, accessible to those with visual impairment, simplify its navigation, present information in an easy-to-use way and lastly, prioritise essential information primarily for its stakeholder audience. The secondary set of priorities was to advance functionality and improve the frontend workflow for RDG staff and its member.

The Challenge

Simplify navigation

As the industry representative, the Rail Delivery Group had amalgamated several microsites over the last few years; with the widening of content, its navigation had grown. We knew that the navigation structure would significantly impact conversions, enquiries, and bounce rates.

Readability & visual engagement

As an information and service website, it's content-rich, with policies, publications, timetables, forms, and documents, all of which are essential to its stakeholders. How could we present information in an easy-to-use and more engaging way? For example, improve human usability and readability; how could we simplify search and make content more visually attractive!

Improving the workflow

The RDG website has over twenty different member groups, with special access to different areas. In addition, RDG staff consists of site publishers, managers, and administrators, all with additional privileges. With a wide range of users, the challenge was to simplify creating content for both staff and members. Could we lose complex admin screens, reduce training time and improve the workflow?

4 column menu layout, grouped to improve search & readability.

On smaller devices, sub-menus items hidden make way for page in searches and navigation.

Navagation

The result was a forward-thinking and easy-to-use four columns navigation.

Each column represents a category group, with further sub-category menus making it easy to navigate. On smaller devices, such as mobile phones and tablets, we opted for in-page searches and navigation, allowing us to remove sub-category menus further.

The result was a website with over 1000 public-facing pages that can be navigated both quickly and efficiently.

Readability

& visual engagement

Driven by human research and the WCAG standard, larger font sizes allowed us to improve text legibility. Menus were made more evident by darkened menu items and the use of white space. Underlines for text hyperlinks improved visibility with web-accessible colours. In addition, we carefully balanced the design elements with AA and AAA compliance. One example was customizable image overlays, enabling the publisher to darken a background image when overlaying text. The results were a visually engaging website that is clean, clutter-free and presents information clearly and readably.

Improving the workflow

Content

Image editing, blog and page creation - done on the front, within a few clicks.

We did this by bringing content creation to the frontend, allowing editing to happen where a frontend publisher would intuitively find it. In addition, we separated more complex tools to the backend, marrying the power of a leading CMS like Joomla!, with groundbreaking simplicity!

Menus

We extended the same concepts to menu management, made it earlier and brought it to the front.

By making the menu editing page aware, site publishers can edit the menu directly (please hover over the image) without using a complex screen. The same principles extend to creating a new menu item for a page.

Publications

We applied the same principles to the day to day management of publications.

It allowed for documents to be uploaded quickly and effectively within three clicks from any page (please hover over the image). No need to visit the backend admin screen; thus, we could reduce complexity and improve efficiency.

Events

Lastly, events and conferences can be managed from the front end, providing a full suite of functionality without the learning curve.

The result is a Joomla system that is more flexible and powerful than WordPress and easier to use than Wix.

WebX Solutions are one of my favourite agencies to work with, their expertise and flexibility to achieve our demanding requests is very much appreciated. We have built and developed some amazing bespoke designs with WebX that are engaging and compelling. The WebX team are always open, honest and thoroughly supportive, their expertise and drive always leads to a well-designed and well-built site that we value.

Paul Miller, Marketing Communications Manager, raildeliverygroup.com

More Case Studies