Building a new digital estate and upskilling Lloyd's Register Foundation's digital teams.
Context
Lloyd's Register Foundation is a global safety charity that uses research, technological development, education, and outreach to help solve the world's biggest safety challenges. The Foundation has global impact drawing upon evidence and insight to build coalitions for change. They recognised the need for a transformative change their online presence, and appointed Numiko to design and build a new digital estate for the Foundation and upskill their digital teams.
Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s goal is to engineer a safer world by funding projects and working in partnership with others across three priority areas: Safer Maritime Systems, Safer Sustainable Infrastructure, Skilled People for Safer Engineering. They operate globally, funding and partnering with organisations across the world, but this international presence and impact of their work was missing from their previous website. This misalignment between the Foundation's mission and its digital representation called for a comprehensive redesign.
Challenge
The goal was to significantly increase user engagement and grow the number of visitors interacting with Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s website. This required a more visually engaging design and compelling and intuitive user experience that would draw in and retain visitors.
A major hurdle lay in the previous information architecture (IA), as users of the old site struggled to find relevant information. Their impact, partnerships and research were all buried deep in the site. Content accessibility was also a consideration - much of Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s valuable research and insights were locked away in PDFs, making them difficult to find and engage with.
Finally, a key challenge lay in integrating multiple sites, including the Heritage Centre archive and the World Risk Poll, into a unified management system. This integration needed to maintain distinct user-facing experiences, while streamlining backend operations. Work to integrate these sites is ongoing.
Approach
To better understand how to solve these challenges, we kicked off the project with a collaborative, in-depth discovery process with the Lloyd’s Register Foundation team. We acquired a deep understanding of Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s needs, goals, and audience, laying a solid foundation for the subsequent redesign.
At the heart of the transformation was a complete restructuring of the site's information architecture. Our content strategist designed a new structure that revolves around Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s key priorities and regions, bringing their impact and internationality to the forefront. Recognising the importance of partnerships to Lloyd’s Register Foundation's work, the new IA features a dedicated section for partnerships and funding. This showcases major collaborations and highlights partners on relevant topic pages. The redesign also included the future integration of the World Risk Poll, previously a separate microsite, into the main site, creating a more cohesive user experience.
To better surface some of the Foundation’s most impactful content, we decided to liberate long-form content from PDFs and bring it to life on web pages. This approach allowed for the inclusion of interactive data, videos, and easier navigation within reports, making Lloyd’s Register Foundation’s valuable insights more engaging and accessible. The new approach means users can still download the content as a PDF if they prefer, but making content web-first makes it easier to surface, crawl and manage.
The Drupal content management system powers the new website, offering a significant upgrade in flexibility for content admins. Unifying multiple sites with a single CMS will save admins time by providing a single portal for the entire digital estate.
Digital brand
Our design team developed a dynamic digital brand, creating a flexible theming system for 'strategic priority' pages controlled within Drupal. This allows each priority area to have its own visual identity, while maintaining overall brand coherence. An innovative visual language, inspired by contour lines from maps, was created to indicate different focus areas, adding depth and meaning to the site's design.
Digital academy
Alongside the website redesign, we worked with Lloyd’s Register Foundation on a digital transformation project to upskill their teams. We called this training program the ‘Digital Academy’.
This tailored training program meant that Lloyd’s Register Foundation could maximise the potential of their new digital tools and platforms. The Digital Academy consisted of six interactive sessions covering a comprehensive syllabus designed to given digital teams the skills they need to manage, deliver and maintain projects successfully.
We began with sessions on digital attitudes and readiness, progressing through user-centred design principles, project management methodologies, and the effective use of data and platforms. The curriculum also addressed inclusive and sustainable digital practices.
What the client says
“Having worked with the Numiko team during our seven-month Discovery Phase, I’m impressed by their expertise, agility and understanding of our complex organisation. They successfully embedded themselves across all teams in the Foundation, auditing our current strategies, ways of working and ambitions – all of which formed a foolproof and achievable roadmap for Implementation. ”