Our brief here was a wonderful challenge incorporating not only the stock-in-trade content management system but a complex database search application.

Running our development streams in parallel to ensure a speedy delivery we quickly prototyped the search application through extensive wireframes for our geek squad to muse over and our client to approve. With a paper prototype agreed we moved to a functioning prototype that provided a working example to play with. This gave our designers the precious 'thinking' time they love so much!

With an early prototype for the organisation to play with there was lots of time for refining and reviewing how it worked in practice. With a tool like this, that's not just a centre-piece for the website but also a complex user interface design challenge, there has to be time for user testing. The rule of thumb is that it only takes about 6-8 users to find about 80% of usability problems.

Using clever 'Web 2.0' AJAX (sophisticated browser interface features) the search application niftily removes those ever-so annoying 'null' search options before they happen (yes, no more "sorry, no results found" hooray!).

We're busy working on our next phase of development to bring further user input and feedback into the search tool and populate the website with more content and features.