The problem

The International Convention Centre is one of central Birmingham’s landmark buildings and has hosted party political conferences for all three main political parties. It’s previous website no longer reflected it’s stature:

• Visually outdated
• Not optimised for mobile
• Event organisers found it difficult to find and compare event spaces within the ICC

The NEC Group (ICC’s parent company) also required a new website for their new venue, The Vox. This would share elements of the ICC’s UI framework, but be distinguishable through different branding.

The solution

Design

The NEC’s marketing agency Eight Feet Tall worked on a new visual aesthetic for the ICC, which resulted in flat PSDs of the site at desktop size. Areas with a high level of interaction were intentionally left blank so that we could prototype these together in-browser.

Frontend development

I led the frontend development for the ICC. My focus was on:

• Ensuring the visual integrity of the designs translated to the web. This included introducing a baseline grid to the designs and adding subtle interaction animations.
• Making desktop designs work well at all sizes down to mobile.
• Modular, maintainable code - particularly important as codebase was shared with The Vox

Working together

At various points in this project I was pairing up with both frontend and backend devs, as well as designers and stakeholders. The ICC’s hall picker was one area that benefited from everyone’s input, which we produced several iterations of following feedback from user testing.

The outcome

The ICC’s new site successfully launched in June 2014, with The Vox’s site launching slightly before.

“Our new website is a great example of what can be achieved by working collaboratively with the NEC Group’s digital marketing team”

Claire Wagstaff, ICC Marketing and Communications Manager [1]

[1] ICC Launches Industry Leading, Fully Responsive Website