The new EATRIS website has launched with a completely new look

The website has been fully redesigned and now includes interactive maps, an improved navigation system, an ‘Explore As’ option to access curated content, beautiful new images, a fresh look for country pages, acknowledgment of funding bodies on every page, an interactive services ribbon, and more!

We conducted extensive work on the needs of our community, including focus groups, surveys, interviews and user experience testing and incorporated all of the feedback into the new design.

From the outset we wanted the website redesign to speak to every corner of our community. A strength of EATRIS is that we have many stakeholders, but this also creates a challenge for how we present ourselves in a way that universally speaks to our many audiences. It became apparent early on that we would need a way to triage our website users to content that is relevant for them. To that end, we are excited to roll out the new “Explore EATRIS as” functionality.

How does this work?
Our universal ‘visitor’ content is displayed as a default when a user arrives on our site. Via a navigation bar at the top of the browser window – users can then select to curate the content according to who they are – a scientist, a policy-maker, a patient or a company. Give it a try! You’ll notice the images, text and content on the pages change according to who you select on the homepage.

Our preliminary work also indicated that we needed to re-think the site navigation. An expandable mega menu was deployed in the header, with the structure and naming convention being adapted in line with stakeholder feedback. For example, we renamed ‘Insights’ to ‘News’ on both the front and backend of the site.

We also:

• added a new ‘Resources’ section – a repository for policy statements, leaflets, our annual report, strategic plan, and more.
• set up a ‘Brand Centre‘ to house our logo for external users, and information about the EATRIS brand.
• the ability to view previous news and events.
• installed a new PDF viewer.
• constructed an EATRIS Quality Initiative (EQI) page.
• introduced a new accordion layout for pages.
• established a new favicon (the website icon that you can see in the address bar or in the browser’s tab).
• re-wrote much of the text on the site.

… and more!

The project was led by Jake Fairnie (Head of Communications), and supported by Piret Pajula (Junior Communications Manager), who would like to thank everyone that contributed to the redesign. Special mention to those people that completed our survey, participated in one of our focus groups and/or took part in one of our interviews. The new site is truly a collective team effort by our community. Moving forwards, the plan with the EATRIS website is to take an agile approach – to constantly refine, iterate and evolve over time. With that in mind, please do get in contact if you have any comments, suggestions or feedback.