Retail Council of Canada
Categories: GUI, Website
Project Description: RCC is a not-for-profit, industry-funded association representing more than 40,000 store fronts of all retail formats across Canada, including department, specialty, discount, and independent stores, and online merchants. In partnership with Prescient Digital, Rossul Design had been contracted to design the look and feel of the new RCC website and deliver a fully tested, all-browser compatible, front-end code.
The Challenge
As the “Voice of Retail in Canada”, the Retail Council Of Canada provides advocacy, research, education and services that enhance opportunities for retail success. As such, the site had a complex amount of content and lot of online resources. The challenge was optimize the user experience and to allow the user to find the exact information they were looking for in seconds.
The Plan
The plan was to put more emphasis on the RCC brand rethink. The registration process should promote advantages or being a member of the site. As well, we want to redesign the navigation to make it simple for users to explore the site, quickly and easily.
The Design
Rossul Design created a unique header design that boldly states the brand. The main navigation, integrated into the header makes it easy to understand the website structure at glance. All page-related information has been moved to the left menu, which changes from page-to-page keeping only necessary functionalities and not overwhelming the user. A login option has been positioned so that it is prominent, and therefore easy to access.
The Result
As a result the website, Retail Council of Canada has enhanced its brand, delivering its robust content and resources in an extremely intuitive manner. The highly intuitive GUI makes the visitor’s site experience deceptively simple, through the intelligent use of consistent and logical navigation.
Rossul Design also created a pure CSS based front-end HTML code that is fully compliant with W3C. We also assured complete accessibility with all major browsers on all platforms as well as screen readers making it usable for persons with various disabilities.
Simplified Site Menu
One of the challenges was to make a large amount of complex resources and other content appear simple and intuitive. To achieve this goal, Rossul Design delivered a global menu, highlighting the main sections. The sub-items have been assigned to the interior pages.
Easy Access for Members
To stress the benefits of membership, and denote that members get maximum usage from the RCC website we placed the login section in the primary upper-left part of the home page.
Page Related Navigation
To make website simple and easy to use, despite the large amounts of information and options, we developed an interactive navigation bar on the left-hand side of the page that consists only of the links relevant to the section’s content.
Strong Brand Support
The new look and feel strongly supports the existing RCC brand. The design of the header makes a clear, consistently branded statement, one that is memorable to RCC members and site visitors alike.