Transport Scotland

The national transport agency for Scotland

The Challenge

Transport Scotland, the Scottish Government's national transport agency, wanted to make their visitors' online experience on their website as smooth as possible. 

The agency wanted to use the web to showcase their work to the people of Scotland – that's why we started from scratch, building a brand new website in Umbraco that would flexibly adapt to meet Transport Scotland's needs over time. 

The challenge of this project was to create an information architecture that would simplify navigating through the big amount of content available and prioritise this with the end user in mind.

The Objectives

  • Discovery and Communication of Transport Scotland’s Organisational Purpose

    The new website should communicate the tasks and purpose of Transport Scotland to their main audience. We ensured that this message was both following Transport Scotland's digital strategy and meeting the user's intentions for information in the most valuable way.

  • Focus on User Needs

    We focused heavily on user testing, both inside out and outside in. That way we made sure that all important objectives and purposes from both Transport Scotland's and the page visitor's view were met and that our new information architecture reflected these.

  • Build a Maintainable Product

    We wanted to build a website for Transport Scotland that would be easy to maintain and develop later in time.
Visit website

The Insight

Transport Scotland's website had to fulfil two main purposes:

Promote Transport Scotland's Brand Identity

The website needed to inform visitors about the responsibilities of Transport Scotland and what they could expect to find on the site.

Technical Information

In addition to this, Transport Scotland also provided technical information that was published on the site and had to be available, even though this type of content was less frequently visited by users.

The Process

Both purposes had to be met with the new design while improving the user experience through simplifying navigation on the site. 

We ensured this through various techniques, which we identified following user testing:

Labelling

Our research suggested that the type of language, although common in certain circles, didn't resonate with our target users. We therefore changed the labelling from techy speak to more commonly used terms, which improved the navigation experience significantly.

Content Clear-out

One of the biggest challenges was the amount of content available. More isn't always better – our thorough insight into the page’s Analytics showed us which content could be archived and which had to made easier to access.

Information Architecture

Finding information should be as easy as possible – we applied a clever tagging system that allowed content to be available at multiple places, always meeting the user’s intention and saving them from having to roam around looking for it.

Related projects

The Scottish Government - Saltire Intranet

Historic Environment Scotland

The City Of Edinburgh Council

Get in Touch

If you're looking to transform the presentation of public information get in touch and we can discuss your requirements.