A new website drives Ireland's campaign for zero emission vehicles

Background 

Zero Emission Vehicles Ireland (ZEVI) is a new dedicated Office within the Department of Transport, charged with supporting consumers, the public sector and businesses to continue to make the switch to zero emission vehicles. 

To support Ireland’s ambitious target of 30% of the private car fleet switching to electric in the next five years, ZEVI provides the public and business with information on EV adoption, including grants and information. 

Stakeholder engagement and communication is one of the four pillars of focus within ZEVI and a website was key to its intent to engage strongly with citizens. 

Challenges

The need to provide information and guidance to a wide variety of audiences posed a challenge in this project. 

This includes: 

• Individuals considering switching to an electric vehicle
• Businesses who are exploring transitioning their LDV and HDV fleets 
• Public service vehicle drivers who want to find out more information on grants that might be available 

It also needed to address general questions and common misconceptions around electric vehicles (EV) such as how long do EV batteries last, are EV cars cheaper to run, and how does the weather affect the EV range.

Our approach 

Our approach focused first on understanding the demands of both the end users and the editors. 

During the discovery phase we held stakeholder workshops to better understand the goals of the project, defined personas for the key audience types, and conducted card sorting workshops to determine the optimal navigation and information architecture structure for the website to ensure users could find the information they needed quickly and efficiently. 

From there we moved into the wireframing stage where we considered the functionality and layout without the distractions of colours, fonts and imagery. 

During the visual design stage, the driving focus was to create a clean, sharp and modern design where content could be consumed easily. The site is very visual with lots of clean imagery to help portray the future of electric vehicles. 
 

The new website for Zero Emission Vehicles Ireland is responsive and easy to use across devices.

Training and guidance was provided to ZEVI staff on the use and selection of imagery so they can keep with the original vision for the site. 

With 5% of the national fleet currently electric, Ireland still has a long way to go in achieving this ambitious target of 30% of electric vehicles by 2030. One of the main challenges for adoption is due to a lack of education and misinformation about EVs.

The ZEVI website hopes to make it easy for people to find the information they need, and also to deliver the correct information, particularly about subjects such as battery life and range – both of which have improved in leaps and bounds since electric vehicles were first sold on the consumer market. 

Considerable time was spent optimising the user journeys to ensure users could find what they needed. As many users visit the site to find out information about grants and other supports they can avail of, a dedicated section covering each of the supports on offer is provided. 

A help and guidance section on the website covers frequently asked questions while also enabling users to ask ZEVI questions if they can’t find the information that they’re looking for. 

Related articles and cross-linking of content on the site, also supports discoverability of content. 

It’s quick and easy to upload content that is relevant, so ZEVI offers users impartial information on an industry that changes rapidly. A great example of this is that when the storm hit in January, ZEVI published a clear piece on running a house off an electric car. 

In line with Irish legislation, the entire site is available in both English and Irish, with a clean and quick language switcher in the header.

Results 

The entire project took about four months to complete. The site is super-fast, obtaining a GTmetrix A performance rating and a 99% performance score. 

It also complies with WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards and received a 99% rating from Google Lighthouse for accessibility. 

In addition, the site is hosted in a green data centre and obtains an A or B carbon rating depending on the page. This is cleaner than 73% of all web pages globally. It also runs on sustainable energy. 

Conclusion 

The goal, ultimately, is to change user behaviour and thinking around electric vehicles. To do this, the correct information about the advantages of these vehicles needs to be easy to find and access. By creating this website for ZEVI, users can easily get the answers to all the questions they have about switching to electric vehicles.