The context
WEEE Ireland is a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to the recycling of Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment, a category which includes batteries, lightbulbs, computer equipment, and both small and large household appliances. Neworld and WEEE have a working relationship reaching back nearly 15 years, when they first came to us for a new brand identity. Since then, our collaboration has covered a wide range of brand collateral, various campaigns, and an ongoing stewardship of their online presence through at least three generations of their main website, along with a separate sites for their flagship campaigns.
The mission
How do you design an online presence that equally serves the needs of two very distinct user cohorts?
WEEE Ireland has a unique set of stakeholders: it’s a non-profit that is primarily funded by producers and retailers of electronic products, set up as a government program that operates under the approval of the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications. It’s also directly involved in outreach and facilitation for consumers and the general public. WEEE came to Neworld looking for an updated website that was more user-friendly, less complex, and optimised to deliver more useful content to their two diverse audience segments of consumers and industry members.
One of the joys of a long client relationship is the depth of understanding we gain about their overall goals and challenges. By the time we worked on the first iteration of the WEEE Ireland website redevelopment, we already had a strong sense of their identity, their mission, the overall landscape and what they needed from their online presence. This allowed us to design the user experience of the website so that every visitor has a clear path to their goal, whether that visitor is a schoolchild who wants to raise money for charity by collecting batteries, an elderly householder who needs help disposing of their ancient washing machine, or a multinational retailer with a massive volume of items to record and recycle on a regular basis.
The transformation
We developed a fully responsive website with a content management system that WEEE Ireland could manage internally, allowing them to update content whenever needed. It’s not just an information clearinghouse, it’s an interactive, engaging experience with real utility. On the consumer side, the best example of this is the interactive map map we created to help website visitors find their nearest local recycling centre, Electrical Retailer, and Bulb Exchange Store. We also added a calendar of monthly events around the country, where consumers can drop off their large appliances for free. From the Producer side, we built systems that would not only make it easier to register, renew, and arrange monthly collection dates, but that would relieve the administrative burden on WEEE Ireland themselves by automating all of these processes with online forms. In just the first year of relaunch, we saw some incredible results. The improvements to the site structure and navigation drove a massive spike in traffic to its internal pages. Over 25,000 visitors used the site to locate their nearest recycling point, and there was a 70% increase in retailers using the online registration form. In that first year, 5600 collection requests were diverted from phone calls to the website. Neworld is proud to partner WEEE in their quest to bolster the circular economy.
