Design Go - B2B e-business solution
Design Go was the first company in the world to actively market the concept of a coordinated range of travel products. Today their products can be found in over 4,000 outlets across the UK and in over 32 countries around the world. With over 5 million units sold each year, the brand continues to strengthen across domestic and international boundaries.

Our brief was to design and implement a clean, uncluttered B2B e-business website that focused on providing up-to-date product information and services to their trade customers and distributors. Enabling customers and distributors to place orders online that would directly integrate with the existing company accounting system was paramount to the success of this project. In turn this should allow the staff at Design Go to maintain the website catalogue from their accounting system.

Discovery Phase
We worked closely with the client in the planning phase to specify achievable business goals and user requirements. Both staff at Design Go and their a selection of clients were interviewed to understand the existing order processes and to highlight areas that the website could improve for both Design Go staff and its customers.

From this we ascertained that a number of unique features would need to be integrated into the system to replicate the each companies unique complexities.

A third party module, developed by Dragnet, was evaluated and chosen. The construction of the module would enable our developers to build upon their foundations. Areas such as the shopping cart would need to be adapted to meet the levels of functionality, usability and deficiency required by users.

Design Phase
Numerous interface designs where supplied to Design Go and a suitable user interface was chosen and refined.

Data flow diagrams and the interface designs were developed and sent to Dragnet. Dragnet then adapted the foundation module based upon this specification.

Production Phase
With the shopping cart and accounting integration module delivered by Dragnet we commenced the task of integrating our designs and bespoke interface programming to ensure the system would perform to the high levels of functionality and usability suggested to the client.

Over 200 products were digitally photographed in our studio and optimised for the web. Working in partnership with Dragnet the e-commerce technicalities - the prototype site was online within two months.

Deployment Phase
The final phase included uploading the entire product catalogue to the website and together with a number of select clients a rigorous testing program was performed before the system went live.

Results and feedback:
"Response from customers has been good. The site has been widely praised for its ease of use and simple shopping process. It is now far easier for buyers to order our products. For example, two people from a national retailer used to spend an entire day placing orders for their 70 stores. It is estimated that the same job can now be completed by one person in a few hours."

"The cost of the application represented excellent value for money when compared to developing a system in-house or trying to integrate an off-the-shelf solution into Opera."