Refreshing the digital experience for the UK’s largest manufacturing trade body

For over a century, The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) has supported food and drink manufacturing in the UK by contributing to legislation and championing members' views on key policy areas.

Following a competitive RFP process to appoint a new digital experience and technology partner, we began working with the FDF to refresh their website – delivering a more impactful look and feel, improved information architecture and stronger front-end accessibility. Our work also focused on improving the logged-in member experience, introducing redesigned templates and content blocks and streamlining publishing workflows within the CMS.

During discovery we undertook in-depth user research to understand how members used the existing website. The insights we uncovered provided valuable insights into what changes and improvements would add the most value to the member experience. 

In collaboration with FDF, our evidence backed recommendations guided a roadmap of improvements to the website that we were able to sequence over multiple releases.

During our design phase we worked closely with FDF’s policy and content teams to re-design user journeys, re-define information architecture and provide guidance on content design and user experience decisions.

We tested our wireframes and prototypes with members to validate our design decisions ahead of any development which provided FDF with confidence that the changes we were proposing were the right changes to make.

Finally, we worked closely with FDF’s brand team to evolve and refresh their digital guidelines to drive consistency and meet the highest levels of accessibility.  

During our design phase we scoped a new set of front-end components and templates that we carefully integrated into FDF’s legacy code base.

These new templates and content components were designed to drive an information centric member experience. We then carefully re-skinned the solutions legacy components and templates to ensure a consistent user experience across older areas of the website that would not be updated.

FDF’s policy and communication teams’ regularity publish important business guidance, market analysis and legislative updates. During our discovery phase, we ran interviews with key members of the policy and editorial teams to listen to their frustrations with their legacy solution. 

With our deep knowledge of the Optimizely CMS we were able to make valuable changes to editorial and authoring workflows to make publishing faster, easier and more intuitive for the trade bodies internal teams.