Standards for Highways - Digital Transformation
Nomensa were approached in Feb 2020 by National Highways to join their Technical Standards Enterprise System (TSES) programme, this largely involved refreshing many of the services that they use and offer. Our part to play within this was to deliver a new user-centred website for the Design Manual for Roads and Bridges (DMRB) service.
The DMRB has been part of the Standards for Highways website since the early 2000’s, when it was originally transitioned online from a paper-based-service and hadn’t been reviewed since. As a result, it was outdated in design and infrastructure, and still mirrored its printed counterpart in labelling and navigational structure.
Within my role as project director on the project, I was responsible for the creating the overall approach to delivering the work within the timeframe and to the high standards expected at Nomensa. I was also responsible for all UX & UI contributions, from the planning and conducting of user interviews, through to the design of the components and pages. During the build phase of the site, I acted as Product Owner; ensuring that all work was prioritised and defined correctly to meet our objectives.
The project presented a number of challenges, firstly, it was the first project we had to deliver during the covid-19 pandemic, secondly the Roads Investment Strategy 1 (RIS1) Government directive we were working within stipulated that the new DMRB website needed to improve both efficiencies and usability by 1st April 2020 – giving us just eight weeks to conduct research, design, test, build and release the new site.
Challenges
To achieve these objectives within the 8 week time frame, I chose a lean approach that allowed us to work quickly and efficiently. We spent the first week working with a range of stakeholders and users to build up an understand of who the users are, how the service works and what opportunities there are for improvement.
Within this week I facilitated interviews with 18 individuals who were chosen to represent the broad range users of the service, from end-users covering the various disciplines of interest through to contributors to the documentation users were looking to find.
In preparation for these, I worked closely with one of our subject-matter-experts to workshop some wireframes and concept structures that would help facilitate conversation around areas we knew would be a high priority for improvement.
These sessions resulted in a deep understanding of the users, their needs and how the DMRB website could be re-structured to better suit their needs. My achievements in this phase included:
To conclude this phase, we worked with our SME to iterate the concepts into a solution that worked for all.
The main challenge with designing the new website to a hi-fidelity was the lack of existing source material and relatable branding that I could use to reference. Due to the politics of the service being managed by the UK Government’s Highways England department (since renamed to ‘National Highways’), but overseen and paid for by Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland equivalent departments, it meant that I wasn’t able to use either of their existing design systems.
To maintain our velocity and not get slowed down by having to go through several iterations and layers of sign-off on the branding and styling, I created worked with the organisations to create a set of 4 principals that were used to save us from having to approach each organisation for their input during the design.
These principals were kept simple:
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From there, I created some simple concepts that allowed us to choose a palette, page template and design direction that we could use as starting points for the final designs. I used these to create a component library, based on Bootstrap, that focused on stripping out superfluous styling whilst embedding accessibility best practise into the design from the ground up. Using a component based approach to the design enabled me to complete the hi-fidelity design work and achieve sign-off within a 10 day period. With that complete, we were ready to begin our build phase.
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When it came to the delivery we had allocated ourselves 2, 2-week sprints in which we could build an MVP. So to ensure the work was deliverable within the timeframe we ran a condensed Sprint 0 period, where we brought our developers and key client stakeholders together to review the backlog of requirements that we had build up through the research and design.
Having the teams discussing and collaborating together at this stage was essential for our delivery, as it enabled us to transparently discuss features and requirements that were more challenging and less critical for the short term MVP. I ran estimation and prioritisation sessions, until we were collectively content that the defined MVP was both achievable and provided sufficient value for our clients.
Some of the decisions we made at this stage included the tech-stack and architecture, were we agreed on a simple, lightweight approach using a JAM stack of Javascript, APIs and Markup. We would do without a CMS for MVP, building the site fully headless to ensure we would have easy opportunities to add in a headless CMS in future improvements (we did - adding Strapi later in the year).
Having the development team so familiarised with the requirements and solutions from the Sprint 0 enabled them to deliver the agreed MVP well within the 2 sprints, we were able to bring some of the higher priority improvements into the MVP as well. The site was tested and launched, on time for the deadline at the end of March 2020.
To help us understand where we should set our focus once the site was live, I created an analytics dashboard, that we could use to help the clients see how the site was performing, what users were doing, and where there were opportunities for improvements.
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You can see the site live here: https://standardsforhighways.co.uk/dmrb/
To date, the site has received over 1.2 million visits and is accessed and referred to from 98% of the world’s countries. These stats, along with the dashboard, are reported to the Transport Minister.
My team helped facilitate the delivery of the DMRB as part of the Technical Standards Enterprise System (TSES) roll out. Our ambitious drive to make the 15,000 page manual more concise, succinct and understandable generated:
And these efforts had a real world impact too:
In 2021, the team scooped up a Highly Commended in the Highways Award for the Best Use of New Technology in the Highways Industry.
“For me, the sustained collective effort is one of the real stand-out features of all that has been achieved. We hugely appreciate that opportunity.” - Steve Davy, Highways England’s Head of Technical Standards.
