First phase of new UKRI website launches today
UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is creating a new, simpler and better website following intensive user research with businesses and researchers.
The new site will ultimately integrate all the UKRI corporate websites, including Innovate UK, to deliver an efficient, informative, inspiring user experience – providing a strong unified voice for UKRI and its 9 councils. The new website will have a phased introduction.
Phase 1 launches the new UKRI site and our unified funding finder
The first phase starts today as we go live with the replacement for the existing UKRI website and a new single funding finder, which will contain all funding opportunities from across all the councils.
Our user research showed that audiences looking for funding visited on average up to 5 different council websites to make sure they had all the necessary information, finding inconsistency in how we provided information.
All the individual council websites including Innovate UK will continue to exist at this stage, but they will not publish new funding opportunities.
News stories will now all be published on the new UKRI website
Phase 2
The second phase of the website development will be complete during 2021 following a further stage of feedback and testing with our users. This will include the full integration of the individual council websites into one overall site.
The new site will follow the Government Digital Service best practice standard for accessible user-friendly content. During development, it used an external provider to audit the site for compliance with accessibility standards, which included testing by users with access needs.
Katrina Nevin-Ridley, UKRI Director of External Relations, Communications and Public Engagement, said:
“The new UKRI website will be easier for people using the site to find out more about what UKRI and the 9 councils do and to find all of the organisation’s funding opportunities in one searchable place.
“Today is just the first step in the new site’s development. We will be integrating all of our existing sites in the coming months so that people can easily navigate and understand how the different parts of UKRI and the various councils contribute to the research and innovation landscape individually and collectively.”
Paul Gemmill, UKRI Director for Reforming our Business, said:
“The new single funding finder is part of UKRI’s Reforming our Business agenda, working with councils to simplify and streamline processes and practice across UKRI to make the lives of users, inside and outside UKRI, simpler and better.”