Sketch designs
Here are a few sketch designs we’ve been working on for the service.
First up, here’s what we are calling the Country Dashboard view. Essentially, you would be able to select a country to view statistics. Stats from doingbusiness.org such as Ease of Doing Business, Risk, Cost of Entry etc are visualised and presented alongside top-level info from UKTI such as opportunity industries, a map of the area or region, a brief description and an indication of some of the activity that is happening on the site relating to this area.
This view relates to a country, such as Turkey but this template may also be used to represent a region or a city.
We think this view is going to really help firms understand which countries are right for them.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.
UK Technology Global Markets group
Julian Hucker
February 2, 2010
at 10:35 pm
As a topline I think it looks very good. However, there needs to be enough common data to ensure that all pages have some content – not just the easy ones to fill.
Whilst the majority might be interested in those markets for which there is a lot of data, those are probably also the markets that least need this type of resource.
The CIA’s World Book is a great example of a resource that contains interesting information on every country.
I’d also suggest that any such pages need to provide a lot of links into the meat of the information. As a dashboard it’s going to be easy to read so users will want to move on quickly
Mike Laurie
February 3, 2010
at 10:15 am
Thanks Julian, it’s surprising how much data there is available on the countries. Pretty much all countries will have all of the same data, the part where it may become more patchy is when you drill down into regional areas and cities. The design of those pages will really depend on what data we can get hold of.
Also, there is really great information we can only get for certain countries. We need to make a decision on whether or not we show that. For example, there’s a firm called Global Web Index that provides really interesting little bits of insight on web usage – http://www.globalwebindex.net/find_out_more.aspx#market but only about 60% of our markets would be able to show this kind of data. In this case I think it’s worth showing the data if we have it. What do you think?
Regarding the links down into the meat of the data, you’re right, this design is really missing a local navigation to help people drill down into smaller geographic regions, industries and/or topic etc.
Moray Angus
February 4, 2010
at 4:43 pm
Very nice. But this is almost exactly what we are delivering with the new UKTI website launching in March/April. Feel free to give me a call on 0207 215 4378.
rgds,
Moray Angus
Head of Online & Research
UK Trade & investment
Mike Laurie
February 26, 2010
at 12:03 pm
Hi Moray, the country information you can see above is only really a small part of the service. It’s more about sharing information about markets with others. I will try and give you a call early next week.
I’m sorry this comment took a while to come through.