Depending on the scale of the project, working for public services can be quite challenging. There are often very limited resources and restrictions to work within, and many decisions have to go through multiple rounds of never-ending debates, reviews and stakeholder meetings.
This reflects most notably with digital products of public services — which often reflect the structures and the nature of the organization. Unsurprisingly, one of the most common responses to any changes of the existing structure is to block it — mostly because it’s challenging the ways of working.
Unfortunately, on top of that, you’ll probably have to deal with long-winded processes and workflows, public procurement, outdated systems and opinionated decision makers. And once you have a complex database with thousands of records, it always comes with severe UX issues around a few key areas: navigation, filters, sorting, search, information architecture.
Fortunately, you’ve just received an incredible offer from the University of York in England, a public collegiate research university with 30+ departments and centres.
You’ve been approached specifically by the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), the largest repository for archaeology and historic environment data in UK. The core activity of the ADS is to store and make available a vast number of archaeological records, discoveries and findings. The big ambition of the project is to redesign its search engine, filters and navigation to make it significantly more useful for the broader audience of its users.
Over the last years, the website went through a series of preparation for the big redesign, consolidating libraries of records, digital publications, practical information about the location, value and importance of digital records. Undoubtedly the information isn’t available for all records, but there is a big ongoing effort to unify all details in one single place.
Most importantly, the following details are now available for you to design with:
The big ambition behind the project is to redesign it from scratch, ideally combining all 3 searches listed below under one search engine. The key goal of the service is to be seen as a trusted digital repository, leading preservation service in the field of archaeology in the UK and enabling archaeologists and experts in related areas to get their work done with it.
Recently the website has gone through a redesign and it has been updated and successfully relaunched. However, went through In fact, there are 3 different search engines that are being heavily used by its visitors: