BUL Visual Reporting Microsite by Accurat

The Banda Ultralarga (Ultrafast Broadband) Strategic Plan ("BUL") for Italy was announced in 2015 with a promise that by 2020, infrastructure to support broadband internet connection would reach every household in Italy. The Ministry of Economic Development’s in-house agency, Infratel Italia, was appointed to lead development. But progress proceeded more slowly than expected, and at the beginning of 2020, construction had only been completed in 92 of the country’s 8,000 municipalities.

Come spring and the COVID–19 outbreak, the project took on a new level of urgency. While the pandemic halted on–the–ground construction, the building of a platform to provide reliable updates on internet connectivity became more important than ever. Infratel Italia contacted us to overhaul the BUL plan’s website, under an aggressive deadline of six weeks.

Our first task was to check the integrity of the site’s building blocks: data inherited from previous partners. The information was couched in a massive, dense file, and parsing it became a joint effort with Infratel’s Engineering and Data Integration department. We worked together to discern content that would help create a better, more meaningful experience for users. While Infratel’s analysts gathered missing figures, our developers built the website’s foundation with deputy placeholders.

Meanwhile, designers worked in lock–step with developers to forecast navigation behavior and design user flows. Because the site’s audience encompassed the entire country, designers worked to imagine every possible scenario. Flexibility was key, as was streamlined, intuitive UI/UX. Appearance–wise, the new website would need to appeal to citizens of all ages, from all walks of life.

The new BUL Plan website launched without a hitch in June, 2020, with major improvements to its predecessor's core functionality, plus new features aimed at making Infratel's work more transparent. Data visualization, a key component of the BUL Plan’s rejuvenated visual identity, figures prominently. As both a tool for communication and a showcase for missions accomplished, it reflects Infratel’s dual motivations in launching a new website: to welcome dialogue, and to elucidate how complex projects come to fruition.

The completion of the entire endeavor in less than two months was a display of nimbleness not often associated with companies in the public sector. Leading newspaper Corriere della Sera described the new website at launch as “Già estremamente precisa” or “already extremely precise.”

In the time since its unveiling, we have introduced advanced functionalites, such as the ability to drill down to a specific address to check the status of construction.