Arken's existing website had been largely ignored for years and the few updates that happened in that time didn't come from a user centred approach. The site had become difficult to use and didn't align with the brand's visual identity.
We took this project right back to the drawing board. We built user profiles, defined the 3 main users of the website and considered how they might navigate through the site with user flow charts. We then built a low fidelity prototype in Figma to test and validate our decisions, before going on to build the site.
Once we had defined our main user profiles, we set out 3 key objectives: to showcase our work, demonstrate our abilities and resources, and encourage users to get in touch.
My design was familiar and ubiquitous, I made affordances according to common trends in website design and focused heavily on usability. Our considered user flow gave us an idea of how a user might navigate through the site and made it possible to lead them towards their desired outcome.
There is a huge bank of information on the site. I chose to use a top down information hierarchy to allow users to choose how much information they want to see. Upon user testing it became apparent that it was very difficult to return to a previous stage in the hierarchy, so we built in a filter to narrow down the amount of case studies in view, and included backlinks on every case study page.