Sport England and UK Sport
Design and development of the Whyte Review website in 6 days
Cyber-Duck has a significant long-term partnership with Sport England, the public body that encourages everyone in England to become and stay active. Collaborating with UK Sport, Sport England needed to rapidly launch a standalone website for The Whyte Review on a short timescale. Cyber-Duck was on-hand to help design, develop and launch in just 6 working days.
Objectives
Cyber-Duck has had a close relationship with Sport England for 3+ years. Originally, Cyber-Duck developed Sport England’s digital strategy and consolidated its website portfolio into a single platform; encouraged the nation to #StayInWorkOut; and contributed activity finders to the fantastic This Girl Can campaign.
In collaboration with UK Sport, Sport England co-commissioned an independent review into allegations of abuse within gymnastics. As an independent inquiry, it urgently deserved its own website that wasn’t branded for either party. Our objectives were to:
- Design the website in a formal, sensitive way to gather evidence
- Deliver a fully-performant website in under a week
Website Design and Development
The Whyte Review website’s purpose was to contribute to an investigation into allegations of abuse within gymnastics. It needed to sensitively inform and softly encourage visitors to provide evidence (i.e., personal stories), to the case, if applicable.
Due to the urgency, we turned around the design in just two days, working as a close-knit multi-disciplinary team applying design sprint methods. Wireframes were created, iterated and signed-off on day one; the UI design, on the next day. UK Sport and Sport England provided all the specific content we required. Our design explained how evidence was needed; the date it was needed by; and what for. This was repeated on every page, as it was so critical. We wanted to ensure the website was formal, clear, and easy-to-understand.
We developed the entire website within four days. As the content was unlikely to change – and due to the short deadline – we collectively decided to build it without a traditional CMS. The website was instead built using Gatsby static site generator and React. We designed and developed a set of flexible components that allows us to quickly add new content and deploy it. That includes videos, notices, resources, downloads, etc.
Results
For the Whyte Review, the power of our delivery management was clear. Each interdependent stage of the build – design, build, QA, SEO, hosting, security and accessibility compliance – was carefully planned and completed on-time. This was critical to meet the deadlines of the legal inquiry and national news coverage; there was zero leeway or margin for error.
We developed an extremely performant website, for the Whyte Review, with scores of 100 on all aspects of the site on Google Lighthouse audits.
Cyber-Duck was instructed to carry out this work (of such a sensitive nature) based on our proven ability to meet tight deadlines for:
- Sport England’s main website
- Join the Movement
- This Girl Can
After the website was launched, there was an immediate response, with hundreds of submissions from current and former gymnasts, coaches and parents through the site. Thanks to the information they provided, the Whyte Review was able to make many referrals to the police. The collected information will be taken forward into a further review stage to assess how gymnastics can be made safer, with stronger safeguarding measures in place for the future. There was extensive national media coverage about the Whyte Review, including the BBC.
We continue to support further (timed) site updates and legal announcements post launch.