Flow Communications recently added another feather to its cap when the South Africa Government Online website went live, using our team’s proposed design.
Designer Lorraine Gumede, and developers Richard Frank and Alex Cowling had worked on the project back in 2011 – two years later, they are happy to have finally seen their hard work being implemented on the site, www.gov.za.
The website provides access to information and services from the South African government, and is geared towards citizens from across the country’s very diverse board.
“My inspiration was ‘clean and sophisticated’ – I wanted an easily navigable website that would enable a seamless user journey,” says Lorraine. “Content had to be easily accessible, as South Africans at large would be using the website.”
Of course, a site with this much information is not without its challenges.
“The website is content-rich, so having to combine an extensive amount of information on a front page and still make it visually appealing was a challenge,” says Lorraine.
The new design has been well received so far, with Sanita Groenewald, web content manager at the Government Communication and Information System (GCIS), saying: “We are very excited about the changes, with most of the comments indicating that it is more user-friendly.”
Of course, this was the intention of the site from the start. Flow head developer Richard Frank explains the programming approach: “It was a great privilege to work on the new user interface for gov.za. The site services thousands of South African citizens every day, so our focus during the wireframing stage was how quickly users could get to the information they required – be it birth certificates, child support information or municipal services. We’re pleased to see some of the concepts have been implemented by the GCIS team.”
After putting in many hours of hard work, the team at Flow are proud of the final product. Go check it out here: www.gov.za.
