Revamping the FWA

Since May 2000, The FWA has been celebrating digital innovation. In recent years, the platform was not living up to the ideals it celebrates, so we partnered with the FWA to do a complete revamp and take a legendary digital award platform to the next level.

Should the new FWA be an evolution or a revolution? We found the answer by looking through 15 years(!) of comprehensive legacy content, and it became clear to us that it needed to be both. The FWA is an iconic institution with a lot of brand equity, but we wanted to find new ways to build more meaningful bridges between users and the brand. Among many new features we are most proud of creating the Live Judging feature, where users can follow judging as it happens.

It’s always risky to change a legacy, but informed by vast prototyping and early user involvement ensured the concepts we created actually worked. We even ran the new voting system alongside the normal jury process to test, iterate and refine using real data. These valuable insights were then implemented in the final voting system. What about the speed? The new platform works as a single-page-app, making transitions between pages seamless and crazy fast. It new, it’s simple, and it’s fast, but it’s still the FWA.