Penguin Books and Dorling Kindersley have just completed a user-centred re-design of their websites. We're pleased and proud that they chose Flow to work with them on the projects.

Penguin and DK's teams told us that they wanted to do some significant rethinking about the purpose of the sites, and the needs of target users. We started with contextual research to build a genuine understanding of what target users need from publishers' websites, and to examine the user experience offered by the current Penguin and DK sites.

From there, Flow conducted workshops to help the teams work out a new user experience strategy, build personas and scenarios and create new site concepts. We consulted to the in-house design teams during the detailed wire framing process, conducted the usability testing, and provided information architecture support for the new facetted classification engine.

Anna Rafferty, Penguin's digital marketing director, has written a blog post about the process.

"Months of workshops, designing, testing and re-designing later and we're happy that we've shifted our site from being a company on broadcast to being genuinely reader-centric."

And Jeannette Angell, Penguin and DK's online development manager has just been interviewed about it by e-consultancy.

"If there's anyone reading who hasn't yet sat behind mirrored glass, watching your visitors try and fail to do what seems to you to be the most obvious task, I urge you to experience it. The lessons learned from this experience can be staggering!"

Congratulations to everyone on the Penguin and DK teams on embracing the user-centred approach, and delivering the sites after so much hard work. And thanks for working with Flow!