Service Delivery
Midlands Online helped design an electronic sheep and goat movement recording system for Wales in React, for the EID Cymru website. This involved a UXD design process to produce a system that was highly responsive and in accordance with GDS standards. We used an accessible colour contrast pallet to meet WCAGG 2.1 AA standards, and audited the system using Wave and Axe DevTools. PDF’s were converted to HTML as per 2018 legislation, and ARIA labels were included to enhance overall accessibility. Together we created an important government system that was accessible, functional and responsive.
Collaborative working and transparency is fundamental to our service delivery, and we have substantial experience working with in-house teams and organisations in the public sector to create successful MVP’s. For Eid Cymru, we pioneered Agile delivery to provide a transparent backlog, giving the client complete visibility of work produced and completed. This was combined with fortnightly stakeholder “show-and-tell” meetings alongside daily “stand-ups”. Our team are skilled communicators and hold daily meetings remotely and in-person with clients and team members to ensure all issues and bugs are identified and discussed. We also utilise Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp and Slack for collaborative transparency.
Brand Development
The Eid Cymru website was rebranded by our team, with the logo and colour schemes changed to improve accessibility and colour contrast compliancy. The current logo uses three different shades of green to emulate the colours of the Welsh hills and farmland – an aspect which the country is renowned for. We put the website through numerous iterations involving accessibility and functionality tests of the interactive elements, ensuring the brand and colour scheme appealed to Users. Despite being a government backed service, we decided against using the gov.wales global experience language (GEL) design guidelines, and instead chose an independent design approach. This was done so that personal politics had no effect on the services provided. Historically, Welsh farmers might hold a bias against a government affiliated system. By having an independent and unique design, we ensured that the branding remained unbiased and original.
As part of brand development, we produced a brand guideline for the website using Storybook, a free writing software. Storybook runs outside the main project so developers can create UI components for different devices and operating systems without having to deal with or manage app-specific dependencies. This helped us with design and brand development because we could plan the project thoroughly before developing the brand.
Website & Mobile App Development
We conduct weekly and monthly review meetings where we review timescales to ensure we meet and exceed the service delivery date. This typically involves the creation of a User Experience Wireframe which maps out the project journey and interactions on each web page. We reference these Wireframes in client meetings to give them an insight to our progress, with feedback integrated for continuous improvement. Our iterative and Agile delivery also ensures we focus on high priority tasks to keep the planned timescales organised and concise. This ensures workloads are managed effectively to achieve the Highest Quality Product within cost.
We used HTML placeholders to switch the content from English to Welsh for website users that needed translation. Once complete, the project worked in both languages and could be adapted to meet the needs of the User. When the website is opened, the User is prompted with what language they wish to use. Through separation of concern in our architecture, we can provide multiple User Interfaces for EID Cymru. The data is provided via secure API calls, the web application is built in React (JavaScript) in tandem with a mobile application built in React Native. React Native gives us the ability to have a single codebase for the Android and Apple App store.
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