The importance of good preparation

Statped has an important social mission: to contribute to ensuring that children, young people and adults with the right to individually tailored education receive an inclusive and adapted educational offer.  

• Their previous digital platform was outdated and had major shortcomings, and was difficult both for Statped's employees to publish in and maintain, and for users to find relevant information in it. 

• The target group for Statped is very broad, from special educators, employees in kindergartens and schools, to guardians, relatives, and adults with various challenges such as hearing impairment, visual impairment, developmental disabilities, neurodivergence and more.  

• Statped consists of many large and strong professional communities. Over time, the output in various digital platforms has become fragmented. There was a need to clean up and give Statped a more holistic digital presence. Ensure that users relate to one Statped.  

• There was an urgent need for a comprehensive strategy for Statped's digital presence, where the content had to be restructured and drastically reduced. 

The process began with an extensive preliminary project, which proved to be crucial to the success. The foundation was laid through a series of workshops with Statped's various professional communities. These workshops, for which ample time was taken, ensured that the line of argumentation was anchored, all voices were heard and everyone was synchronized around the common goals. This early and deep insight into the customer's needs and internal dynamics provided a solid platform for further work. 

A key part of the process was a massive review and restructuring of the content. From an original 7,000+ pages, the website was severely cut down to around 1,000 pages through rewriting and restructuring, a job Statped itself carried out with guidance from Dekode .  

The design was continuously user-tested in consultation with Statped to anchor and verify hypotheses. Dekode also played an active role in helping Statped communicate the changes internally, ensure broad buy-in from top to bottom, and work with change management throughout the project. A dedicated external quality assurance (QA) team, unaffiliated with the development team, ensured extremely strict quality requirements, especially in WCAG compliance, and provided valuable “fresh eyes” on the project. 

The result of the close collaboration is a completely revitalized statped.no. The website is one-seventh the size of its previous size in terms of number of pages, but communicates Statped's work far more effectively and precisely than before.  

User-friendliness and accessibility have been significantly improved, ensuring that Statped's important information and services are easily accessible to all target groups. The modern technical platform gives Statped the flexibility they need for future development and maintenance, and solves the challenges they had with the previous solution. 

The thorough process has not only resulted in a technically robust and user-friendly website, but has also had positive ripple effects internally within Statped. By deeply and systematically involving the professional communities, the project helped to reduce internal silos and promote better collaboration. The shared anchoring and ownership of the project, created through repeated communication and a focus on “one Statped”, has laid the foundation for a more streamlined and unified digital presence that serves Statped’s social mission in a safe and secure way. The trust and co-creation between Statped and Dekode was the key to success with a project of this size and complexity.