We’re excited to share a personal project—our journey redesigning our own institutional website. By implementing the design thinking process, Notitia set out to reimagine its institutional website.
Not every website needs a redesign. The first step is to conduct research to understand how your website aligns with user experience and expectations. A clear analysis can reveal whether minor adjustments or a full overhaul is necessary.
In our case, it was evident that we needed a redesign that reflected how much we’d grown. While our site was functional, Notitia had evolved significantly over just a few years, and our website no longer represented who we are and what we do.
In our research we had identified key pain points in the user experience. We wanted to address these challenges to create a seamless and friendly experience, ensuring our website effectively communicated our services and values.
The design thinking process is a user-centred approach to problem-solving that emphasises empathy, ideation, and iteration. This iterative cycle helps ensure that solutions are not only innovative but also practical and aligned with user needs.
We gather insights to understand user needs and challenges, then clearly define the problem to solve, ensuring we address the right issues.
We brainstorm solutions, explore possibilities, and generate ideas to address the defined problem, focusing on user needs and innovation.
Turning ideas into tangible models. We create drafts or mockups to test concepts, refine solutions, and gather feedback before final implementation.
To better understand our users, we focused on empathising with their frustrations and identifying their needs. Using tools like Typeform and Hotjar, we listened directly to their perspectives and observed how they interacted with our site.
Allowed us to collect valuable user feedback and deeply better understand their specific challenges, as hearing it firsthand provided crucial insights.
Helped us see how users navigated the site, highlighting areas where they experienced confusion or disengagement.
This research revealed several key issues:
• Lack of clarity for new users:
Visitors unfamiliar with consultancy agencies often found it difficult to understand our services and their potential benefits.
• Ineffective homepage as a navigation hub:
Our homepage wasn’t effectively guiding users to explore other sections of the site, limiting engagement with additional content.
• Web architecture and user flow issues:
Navigation challenges, such as U-turns and dead ends, disrupted the user journey, preventing meaningful engagement.
• Content visibility problems:
Although we had compelling content, layout issues often made it easy for users to overlook key information. Below, you can see the initial report for the homepage as an example of our findings.
We want to share a bit of our process and insights with you, so here’s a sneak peek at the report we created for the homepage, which we shared internally as part of our analysis and workflow.
After identifying the key issues, we moved into the ideation phase. Our goal was to reimagine the user flow and site architecture to ensure users could navigate smoothly while easily accessing all the information about our services.
To reduce bounce rates, we also made sure the entire website felt interconnected. By ensuring all pages were thoughtfully linked and part of a cohesive structure, we aimed to keep users engaged and guide them naturally through the site without any dead ends or friction points. This phase involved mapping out a clearer structure for the site, prioritising intuitive navigation, and ensuring our services were presented in a way that was both engaging and easy to understand.
Our goal was to simplify the design, reduce unnecessary animations, and use them with purpose. Previously, some animations existed solely to create a "cool" vibe, but we decided to make them more intentional—serving to highlight content.
We also moved away from abstract and 3D icons, which, while visually appealing, negatively impacted loading times and didn’t help users connect with the information. Instead, we chose a more literal approach: if we’re discussing data analytics, the accompanying imagery should clearly represent the concept.
We began the prototyping process by creating drafts for the website pages. This phase coincided with a rebranding effort, as we wanted to give the site a fresh, clean look.
Additionally, we worked to create a cohesive design system—one that would be easy to interpret, consistent across the site, and free from unexpected surprises. By maintaining this consistency, we ensured users could navigate intuitively and focus on the content.
Lastly, we aimed to streamline the colour palette, reducing the number of colours for a more cohesive and professional appearance. This was a parallel process: as we built and tested page layouts, we experimented with different approaches to refine our new visual identity.
