Getting Scotland On Their Bikes

A digital transformation of Cycling Scotland’s award certification system.

Cycling Scotland’s awards programme supports workplaces, schools, campuses and communities across Scotland to become Cycling Friendly.

The existing service and process were cumbersome, time-consuming and predominantly manual, involving numerous phone calls, reams of paperwork, disconnected spreadsheets, cupboards full of filing cabinets and maxed-out inboxes — with far too much time and management required from the Cycling Scotland team.

It was our job to design a streamlined new system and service.

Our challenge was to understand the existing service and certification process, and the needs of all stakeholders — from end users of the service to service administrators.

From there, we would design and build a complete digital transformation of the service.

Our core objectives were to improve the overall operational efficiency of the service provided by Cycling Scotland, making it faster and simpler for assessors to process certification, and to allow businesses, campuses and schools to self-serve and take far more control of their applications and progress — ultimately streamlining processes and easing the pressure on the Cycling Scotland team and service administrators.

We began by running workshops with administrators and interviews with end users to identify pain points and needs, creating and testing interactive wireframe prototypes, gathering feedback, and iterating designs into visual prototypes for continuity and improvement tracking.

Working closely with Cycling Scotland, we then designed the back end to support assessors using the system daily across devices. Running fortnightly demos with administrators and regularly testing with users ensured issues were addressed early and effectively.

We created a single-focus style form to reduce on-screen distraction, using pink as an accent colour to create highlights, indicate progress through the journey, and encourage completion.

Curves were taken from the new brand work to complement the feeling of smooth motion and add an element of fun and forward momentum. We also created a parallax scrolling effect, with our cyclist passing various iconic Scottish landmarks.