UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is creating a website following intensive user research with businesses and researchers.

The site will ultimately integrate all the UKRI corporate websites, including Innovate UK, to deliver an informative, inspiring user experience – providing a unified voice for UKRI and its nine councils.

The first phase went live today, with a replacement for the existing UKRI website and a new single funding finder, which will contain all funding opportunities from across all the councils.

User research showed that audiences looking for funding visited on average up to five different council websites to make sure they had all the necessary information, finding inconsistency in how we provided information.

All the individual council websites continue to exist at this stage, but they will not publish new funding opportunities.

The second phase of the website development will be complete during 2021, following a further stage of feedback and testing with 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: “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.”

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