I was the Design Director and lead Frontend Developer at SHIFT Active Media when we won the project to redesign the British Cycling website as part of a wider digital transformation taking place within the organisation. The project came at an exciting time as Britich Cycling was basking in after glow of dominant performances at the Beijing and London olympics and the UK was in cycling fever.
The brief was to build a platform that would allow memberships and renewals to move to online and direct debit, while providing a rich news, media, resource, clubs and events hubs to support membership activation and engagement all over the country.
While our brief was to do design only, I observed at the time that the in-house British Cycling development team was made up of backend developers only. Responsive design was also in relative infancy and modern responsive design tools hadn’t been invented yet.
I pushed for an approach that would see us push to build a design system for British Cycling’s website and membership portal, and effectively design everything in the browser. We supplied weekly updates to a pattern library with production ready HTML, CSS and JavaScript for the British Cycling development team to drop into their platform.
The approach was a huge success and saw British Cycling be the first national sports governing body to go online with membership sales and renewals, as well as being the first to adopt responsive web design. The approach led to SHIFT going on to win similar projects to reinvent the digital presence of British Triathlon and British Rowing.
I was the sole designer on the project and the lead and only non-freelance developer on the project. I worked with the British Cycling product and development teams in an agile fashion to continuously deliver throughout the project. After a successful launch we continued to work together releasing UI updates for further areas of the platform such as the membership portal.
