Founded in 1994 as a bipartisan agency to provide advice to the President and Congress on issues of old-age, survivors, as well as Disability Insurance and the Supplemental Security Income programs. The Social Security Advisory Board (SSAB) was getting hundreds of calls and even walk-ins to their office by people looking for the Social Security Administration (SSA), creating confusion for everybody. That’s when Ignition72 was brought in. The new website needed to be clean and professional, not only in assisting policy researchers, but also in providing clarity to everybody that SSAB is not the Social Security Administration!

Learning + planning

The website itself required some robust document and file support, as well as calendar and scheduling capabilities. Our team also worked to evolve the brand; Coming up with a new logo and leveraging the U.S. Web Design Standards to create a clean, focused, and easy to use interface that also immediately helps visitors recognize that they are NOT on the SSA website.

Style exploration

The U.S. Web Design Standards are quite robust, but our team has formidable experience working with it on other projects, such as for the VA and the GSA. In this case our goal was clarity and efficiency. Know where you are and get what you need quickly.

Design + development

Built in WordPress, this open source site is focused, yet easily updated and edited. Any documents from board meetings are simply updated through Google Drive, and the internal SSAB team is able to independently handle all of the frequent site updates.

With a new, clearer, and easier to use website, we have seen growth not only in the volume of traffic since launch, but in site engagement as well. Looking at the site’s analytics, site traffic has grown 75%, repeat sessions are up 25%, new users up 73%, page views up an astounding 268%, and the average time on site is up 51%. Additionally, in that time, the bounce rate has also dropped by 78%.

Founded in 1946, Hagerstown Community College is Maryland’s first community college. Over the years, they have offered hundreds of affordable courses that not only educate, but also empower the local community. Ignition72 was selected to help HCC reinforce it’s brand and better communicate with all members of the community, from students, faculty, and staff, to even local stakeholders, all through a new more engaging website.

Learning + planning

Planning employed our traditional Strategy First™ approach, with multiple in person meetings on campus to explore, understand and define the key variables for the new site, including clearer navigation, consolidated site/campus wide alert systems, and a new design that would better allow students and the community to see how HCC helps people improve their own stories.

Style exploration

Since the HCC brand is mature and established, our design team worked closely with their communications team to best represent the brand. This was instrumental in the use of colors, fonts, and the visual assets, such as the home page video or the use of photography that appears throughout the site.

Design + development

HCC accentuates and enriches the trajectories of the students that attend. It was important then, that the brand not be too heavy or overpowering. We wanted to help students see themselves on the pages of the website instead, whether they are full-time students, are attending continuing education classes, or even are part of the advanced high school student programs offered on campus.

Under contract with Digicon Corporation, Ignition72 had the opportunity to design and build a new City Schools website that welcomes all users on any device to a visually positive and robust new website. This site includes important tools like the School Comparison, where kids and parents can explore various school options. We had to ensure that the site was multi-lingual and accessible, while empowering the School District to manage, control and update all aspects of the site.  

Learning + planning

Planning involved a detailed landscape analysis, including Google Analytics data, stakeholder outreach, surveys, user testing as well as an iterative planning review with all internal City School stakeholders. Audiences and their goals were defined, content mapped, functionality documented and wireframes generated to ensure that the City Schools team considered every possibility before settling on the best solution.

Style exploration

The new City Schools website is clean and clear, with bright primary color splashes to deliver a fresh and modern message, as well as appeal to students. Photography is very upbeat and positive, always showcasing a City Schools community member. Throughout the site color is brought in to draw the eye, but also to create an overwhelmingly positive user experience.

Design + development

Tailoring the design to our specific audience was very important, so we held multiple user feedback sessions early in the design phase. Walking community members through static layouts and clickable prototypes helped us reaffirm and tweak some of our design decisions.

The site was designed from scratch to be a new Drupal 8 powered system.

The new site launched in January 2019 and within the first month it had over 179K users visit the site over 378K times, spending 2:24 minutes on site, and viewing an average of 2.9 pages per visit. Compared with this time last year this is an increase of 195% in overall traffic, a 114% increase in average time on site and  a 198% increase in page views. The bounce rate, or number of people who leave from the first page in less than a minute, dropped by over 112%.

The new site includes robust Google Analytics facilitated through Google Tag manager, so we have granular data relating to everything that happens on the new site.

The final site is hosted by our partners the Digicon Corporation.

The Lieber Institute is world-renowned for their work on brain disorders. Their ambitious goal is to translate the understanding of the mechanisms of the brain into advances that change the lives of people affected with brain disorders. They do this through a unique multidisciplinary translational research approach, which includes the the LIBD brain repository – the largest collection of postmortem human brains for the study of neuropsychiatric disorders in the world. And we’re pretty sure they’re going to achieve their goal. We were honored to design and build their website in 2016, then update the site with a minor redesign in 2020.

Using our trademarked Strategy First process, we sat down with the Lieber team and talked about their audience (wide and varied), their goals (ambitious), and their design aesthetic (bright and bold). We looked at the landscape of other research institutes, and talked about what their website needed functionally. They like motion – lots of video used to educate, inform, spur donations, and to provide a visual interest on the site.

The National Credit Union Administration (NCUA) partnered with the Department of Education with two goals in mind: Help adolescents understand basic finance and economic principles, while introducing Credit Unions to a whole new generation. The desire was for an online resource that could be used in classrooms, at home, or even in the lobby of a credit union, to entertain AND educate the kids using it. Ignition72 offered to build a custom game for the NCUA website that would appeal to their desired audience. 

The parameters of the project were explored during our Strategy First™ sessions, with the following framework:

• Do not use old or exclusionary technologies like Flash. Use browser standard HTML5 and allow it to be tablet and touch friendly
• Game should provide 25 -35 minutes of engagement
• It must be compliant with Section 508 to allow access to all
• The audience would be youth aged 7 -12 years and have representations of all ethnicities and physical dispositions
• Players should earn and spend money, have a timeline of goals as well as opportunities to have experiences, and learn new things, all while having fun
• A final report card on how the player performed would sum up the experience and provide a portable memento of the game
• The goal: to teach financial literacy to kids without them realizing it

Being avid gamers, we had plenty of experience to draw from. The following key components of the game were defined through close collaboration with the client:

• Choose from many different characters, each possessing different skill sets that would impact the game outcome
• Have the game concept be built around teenagers paying for a trip to go skiing, and they must earn money along the way
• Allow players to be exposed to concepts such as Opportunity Cost, Balancing your Checkbook, Financial Planning (managing a budget), Loan Management (being responsible for a loan and a payment schedule), and more in a game play environment
• Provide opportunities to make money, leveraging character skills whenever possible
• Create wildcards where bad things happen that can be mitigated with forward planning
• Tempt the player with diversions, including sightseeing, purchasing souvenirs and more, to demonstrate the importance of a budget and financial restraint

The game was fully mapped out to allow the Ignition72 team to present detailed storyboards and game mechanics documents to NCUA for approval.

Rather than build the game completely from scratch, the Ignition72 development team leveraged the Impact game engine to provide a core framework.

Ignition72 then:

• Sketched out character concepts, which were scanned and built out in Illustrator
• Created landscape and cityscape artwork to reference the actual location of the player, while serving up interesting facts and tidbits about each location
• Composed original music to act as a backdrop during the game
• Developed the game core at which point player skills and external variables were adjusted to maximize the fun, while making it as realistic as possible

The game has introduced key concepts to over 10,000 children, many in the context of their classroom or at a Credit Union. The game is fully built in HTML5 and Javascript, and is fully Section 508 compliant.

Even though the game is one complete unit, it was designed and built to allow for future enhancements, either making more difficult levels, or adding in different trips or adventure scenarios. You can play the game at: tinyurl.com/Ignition72NCUA

You don’t have to ever been to DC to have heard about the traffic: the gridlock is legendary. To help, Transurban developed the 495/95 Express Lanes: A pay as you go system of toll roads that can alleviate the crush in both directions, every day of the week. But managing the process was proving tricky: Fines and notifications were issued by mail, often taking weeks to resolve. Customers had limited access to live information including costs, live video and other resources to help them better plan their journeys.

Collaboration

Ignition72 worked with the Transurban team to put in place a back-office API connection which culminates in an iOS/Android Native app. Users can register, track their tolls, access live travel information, maps and more. This means you no longer need an EZ Pass to use the toll roads, and the best information is always at your finger-tips.

The app has been in use and we have built a few marketing videos for them too.

Every year tens of thousands of building and land environmental reports are created to answer specific questions or facilitate sales and other transactions. In the past, these reports existed on paper and were cast away after they were consumed, meaning that the next owner would have to start from scratch: losing the knowledge and context, as well as continuity, that the previous reports could provide.

Ignition72 worked closely with the NESAD team to create a custom system and process that would interconnect environmental assessment companies around the country. The System: A massive database of reports that is searchable using Google Maps (address, lat/long, etc) to determine whether any existing reports exist, what type etc. Integrated into the mapping system is the ability to order updated or even new reports from the environmental teams who know the site, have the equity and the experience.

Ignition72 worked closely with the NESAD team to create a custom system and process that would interconnect environmental assessment companies around the country.

The Houston Independent School District has many websites, including one for each school. These thousands of pages exist within a fixed and rigid template, ensuring that all schools operate on an even field, with the same tools and resources. While this works for the overwhelming majority of HISD’s needs, District wide programs like the Continuing & Technical Education program (CTE) do not fit into the same template as a high school.

HISD met with the Ignition72 Strategy team, and we planned a best practice WordPress deployment, utilizing custom themes to showcase the incredible projects, situations and opportunities the HISD CTE Program represents. CTE Staff were trained to manage and control the site, making their online presence aspirational, nimble and focused.

It worked so well the rest of the district is jealous and making them take down the site!

Check out their site