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The jury's motivation emphasised the website's focus on the needs of the visitor, that it is fully adapted for mobile use and that it has a powerful search function that provides a clear view of the university's programmes and courses.

"HiQ has been a valuable partner throughout the entire process and we're so happy about and proud of the results and the award. Creating a website that can clearly display 57 educational programmes, 1,000 courses, hundreds of research projects and our 1,000 employees is challenging. That's why we switched our focus to the target audiences and created natural flows based on the visitors' needs - and it's really great that the jury highlighted this," said Emma Sandsjö, Director of Communications at Mälardalen University.

HiQ won the assignment of helping the university develop a website that met the high demands of the target audience while also designing a solution that worked with the university's somewhat complex integrations with the surrounding systems. The objective of the project was for the website to help increase the number of applicants to programmes and courses at the university, simplify things for existing students, attract partners, highlight research and strengthen its employer brand.

HiQ delivered project management, Scrum Master, system architecture, web development, accessibility testing and advising within UX and design. The website was built in SiteVision and conforms to WCAG 2.1. HiQ conducted an accessibility test soon after launch to reach level AA status.

"We have a lot of experience in web development for the public sector as well as specific expertise in accessibility. Making information accessible is a great challenge for some of Sweden's public organisations, and many of them are approaching us with these assignments at the moment. There is a lot more to do in this very important area," says Ander Nilsson.

This year, a record number of websites were nominated for the Guldhanden, an award that is handed out in the categories commercial website, public website and intranet. To be nominated for the award, the website must be built with SiteVision, which is one the most common web publishing systems in Sweden today. The jury consisted of an independent group of web experts from Web Service Awards, Språkkonsulterna, InUse and SiteVision. 

The jury's motivation
"The winner is an organisation that has left behind the from within perspective to focus sharply on the needs of the target audience. They have made the website simple to use, even on small screens, since most users visit the website from a mobile. The winner has also built an effective search function that makes it easy to find the right educational programme. But the real achievement is surely that they have gotten rid of about 73,000 web pages (yes, you heard right), while increasing the number of applications by 23 percent. Wow! We say well done to ... Mälardalen University!"

For more information, please contact:
Erik Ridman, Director of Communications HiQ, tel: +46 70-420 00 01, e-mail: erik.ridman@hiq.se