A corporate online presence for the redesigners of UK airspace

About the client

ACOG is the team tasked with coordinating the redesign of the UK’s airspace.

ACOG was commissioned by the Department for Transport and the Civil Aviation Authority to create a Masterplan for the interdependent airspace change proposals in the UK.

The Masterplan has five strategic aims, set by the Secretary of State for Transport:

1. Creating additional airspace capacity to support the growth of aviation.
2. Reducing controlled airspace to the minimum necessary to facilitate safe aviation operations.
3. Removing unnecessary lower airspace constraints.
4. Reducing airspace efficiency and congestion-related delays for passengers.
5. Reducing noise and CO₂ emissions.

Project goals

ACOG relied on their campaign website Our Future Skies to raise awareness of the organisation. But their work on airspace modernisation goes beyond the Our Future Skies campaign.

ACOG was looking to establish itself as a separate entity digitally to:

• Define its role in coordinating and leading the programme for airspace change.
• Increase awareness of the organisation and the work it does among a wider stakeholder audience.
• Communicate with its audiences regarding the final phase of the Airspace Modernisation Strategy.
• The website also needs to be capable of hosting an online consultation in the future

Method

Project roles and responsibilities were defined to make it clear who the decision makers were, who needed to give input, and who just needed to be kept informed as the project progressed.

We began work by reviewing the business and project goals, and defining ACOG’s users and their needs. Ensuring we were all on the same page at the very start meant we could be sure to bring value to ACOG and their audience through the website.

The project had a modest budget and a short time frame. So we decided that each stage of the project should be approved and signed off before moving to the next stage — the waterfall model.

Often digital projects are run in an agile way, but that doesn’t suit every project. We always use the method we feel best suits our client’s needs. In this case, the waterfall model would minimise the need for changes and protect the client’s budget.

Designing a corporate website

ACOG work with Stonehaven for communication strategy and brand design. We commonly work with other agencies.

Isaac, our Design Director, met with the Stonehaven team to understand the communication strategy, brand status, and ensure the team was comfortable working together.

The ACOG brand had been established, we reviewed and extended the brand to make it more usable on the web.

Vibrant colours were established for social media campaigns but this website was to have a more staid and corporate style.

So Isaac created a design direction that feels established and grounded but has nods to the vivid social media campaigns. This was an important design consideration, to ensure cohesion between campaign and corporate communications.

While the visual design work began, we produced a site map and wireframes to communicate the structure and scope of the website.

We presented our designs to ACOG stakeholders to ensure everyone was happy and the work aligned with future plans.

Development

The site was built in WordPress using ACF (Advanced Custom Fields – a WordPress Plugin) and Amplify, our open source design system.

Isaac completed the design work in the browser at the development stage, saving some time and budget.

Analytics

We set ACOG up to track how engaged users are on the website, by looking at the following metrics:

• Total volume of page views
• Average duration on a page
• Bounce rate

We used Matomo Analytics because it offers better privacy for users. Also setting Matamo up without using cookies meant we didn’t need a cookie notice on the site.

You can read more on our approach to using Matomo in this blog post.

Results

In the first 6 months there were 11,000 page views. The bounce rate is 53% (which is under the industry average) and the average visit duration is 2 minutes and 20 seconds.

These stats together show that the level of engagement is high and the website is helping ACOG to establish itself as an independent group with a platform to make those crucial connections with stakeholders.

Following the success of this project, we’ve also worked with ACOG on the One Sky One Plan website.