DISABILITY charity Designability has been helped to improve its support for disabled people by creative agency Milk & Tweed.

The Wiltshire agency, which specialises in website, brand and logo design and digital marketing, has designed a new website for the Bath charity that, says Digital Communications Manager Fiona Cromwell, will make life easier for parents and carers looking for information.

The charity, which was founded in 1968 and is based at Bath Royal United Hospital, develops products to give disabled people more independence.

Its most successful product is the Wizzybug, a colourful powered wheelchair aimed at children under five. The charity has more than 300 Wizzybugs on free loan to families and over the last 11 years more than 1,400 children all over the UK have benefitted.

Of late Designability has focused more sharply on family mobility and is also developing a pushchair that can be used with a manual wheelchair and design guidance for accessible EV chargers, as well as being part of a national working group on improving access to transport for disabled people.

Mrs Cromwell said the charity needed a new website to make it easier to communicate what it does, both for service users and would-be donors.

“We don’t have any regional teams around the country and yet we are trying to reach people all over the UK, so for us, our digital presence is something we rely on,” she said. “It is completely invaluable to us to have to have an effective website.

“Our old website didn’t reflect where we have got to as a charity, as we have this new focus on family mobility. We just wanted something brighter and more contemporary, but the user journey was the biggest priority.”

She said the new site, with its more modern, uncluttered, feel has had a positive response. “We had a small group of user testers, which was a mix of  Wizzybug parents, volunteers and supporters and all of them had really positive things to say,” she said. “They felt it was very easy to use and said it looks really modern and looks exactly how we feel it should look.

“It felt like from the get-go, it fulfilled those basic things we wanted to get out of it.”

The new site will soon have a Wizzybug Zone for parents who have one on loan. “It will be incredibly useful to families,” said Mrs Cromwell. “They’ll be able to log in  and see confirmation of when their provisional end of loan date is. They can access tutorial videos and a directory of other organisations that might be able to support them. It’s going to have a wealth of information.”

She said the excellent working relationship with Milk & Tweed’s team has contributed to the success of the redesign project. “I found them really personable people, really warm and approachable,” she said. “If there were certain things I had queries about, they were always very responsive and I felt like they really understood the charity and what our objectives were.”

The charity was recently the subject of a BBC fundraising appeal. “We had a website traffic surge as a result of that, which obviously was fantastic,” said Mrs Cromwell. “It was very important to us that we got the website live in time for that, because we wanted people to have a really great experience when they looked us up, as they obviously did.”

Jamie Lawton, Head of Design at Milk & Tweed, said: “It was an absolute pleasure working with Fiona and the Designability team to create a more modern and streamlined website with clearer user journeys. It was important that the website helped to better showcase the incredible work that the charity does, and tell some of the happy stories of individuals and families using their innovative products.

“We love to work with charities, especially when they’re based locally, and as we complete the Wizzybug Members Zone and look to create a smoother online application process, there are still lots of exciting developments to come.”

See the charity’s new website at designability.org.uk and find out more about Milk & Tweed’s services at milkandtweed.com.