Taxi Regulation: Integrated Online Presence

In January 2011 the functions of the Commission for Taxi Regulation were incorporated into the National Transport Authority (NTA). All of the content from the existing taxiregulator.ie web site needed to move onto the NTA site. This provided an ideal opportunity not only to review and update that content, but its navigation and visual presentation as well.

In designing the updated taxi regulation pages within the NTA site, our contribution was in the areas of brand guidance, page architecture, navigation and user interface design. We transferred our understanding of the taxi regulation brand and of their user’s requirements into an online environment.

We worked in partnership with the internal NTA team, their content advisor and online agency to deliver a solution that meets all communication requirements. We defined a simplified structure for their new web pages. They edited and rationalised all of their existing text. This facilitated our recommendation for more direct and intuitive navigation. The pages now present three categories of information: for users, for operators and general news. We designed a suite of prominent graphic icons to accompany and enhance the short effective headlines now being used.

The new visual style is understated. We considered SPSV operators reading the pages on smartphones in their taxis parked at ranks, rather than viewing them on computer monitors. Given the scope of the NTA’s taxi regulation operations, their published content will increase over time and search will always be crucial. Therefore we have enlarged and emphasised the search box and given it a more prominent position on all web pages. The new pages emphasise the NTA brand, which is an important signal to the various audiences about the newly integrated status of the previous body.

The new pages went live in January 2011. Initial feedback from stakeholders is that navigation and discovery of relevant content is more efficient.