Delivering the Man City Annual Report — Redux
It’s been a year since I last wrote about our Annual Report and taking a quick read through the dev site while testing shows just how much we’ve been up to. It’s easy to forget this when you’re head-down in delivery. But, as last year, it’s a great opportunity to reflect on what’s happened on the pitch, but also our engagements with the fans.
So — we’d like to reflect slightly too. We were extremely happy with the site that was created to house last year’s report and we think it’s fair to say that the reaction to it was also pretty favourable.
We also spent a lot of time ensuring that, while the design was impactful, the site was usable, engaging and more importantly — fan focused. Plus, we have to remember this is an annual report. Not usually the most compelling reading. So you can imagine how thrilled we were to see that not only were we nominated for, but also turned out to be a runner up in, the Design Week Awards for best Website Design. And we were in excellent company!
Not ones to rest on non-existent (yet) Annual Report laurels, we give a hat-tip to our friends at Method and the San Francisco Ballet; we’re coming back stronger this year! Building on the success of 2016 and delivering something with even more bite. We laid some foundations last year with some exciting (!) domain conventions so you’ll always be able to find the latest report, we’ve worked with our design partners to bring a freshened-up front-end coupled with the addition of our (now spreading) global header and are stretching our design principles to the limit.
We also need to remind ourselves of the challenge from last year, which have been retained for 2017:
- Delivering a visually impactful site, rich with infographics and imagery
- Delivering a performant site across a variety of connections and…
- Delivering support across multiple devices
- Introducing a navigational approach that would be understood by all users
- And — complying with our Digital Style Guide that aims to introduce more standardised site interactions across City properties
As last year, the task remains unenviable for the designers and some tough decisions were made about new interaction paradigms around the hero images, the menu structures and certain animated elements. We opted to drop those — and you can only imagine how divisive a “shaky” title can be….
And as last year, there were still some interesting challenges identified during acceptance testing, mainly for Mac users. We’re trying to load a decent amount of content without lag so that it connects as strongly as possible as soon as possible. Scrolling and loading were optimised and images refactored to reduce the overall weight of the page. Plus, we’re using our improved Azure hosting for this site, building on the conventions that we’ve been rolling out across the wider digital estate.
This year’s outing, which you can find at annualreport2017.mancity.com, has not just re-used learnings and certain design/code from last year which has meant that it’s been a (relatively!) light touch deployment, it’s another example of how focused we remain on learning, iterating and communicating effectively with a variety of users. Plus, it reiterates how working across departmentally we can achieve big wins from (again, relatively..) unexpected places.
As always we welcome your feedback, either below or via Twitter.
And, lest we forget, the 2016 site also took a bronze prize at the Digital Impact Awards in the “Best use of digital to an investment audience” category. We’ll be keeping an eye on that one, too…!
