Irish School of Motoring

The brief

ISM, the Irish School of Motoring, has been teaching Ireland to drive since 1961 — cars, and seven commercial vehicle categories that each carry a different licence, a different price and a different kind of customer.

A seventeen-year-old booking a first car lesson and a haulage operator putting a driver through an artic licence are not the same customer, do not use the same words, and do not convert on the same page. ISM sells to both, plus six categories in between, and runs two sister companies alongside. That made it a content architecture problem before it was a design one, so I started with the sitemap rather than a moodboard. The copy itself was written by Loco with ISM.

The scope

A national school, eight vehicle categories and two sister companies, most of it reaching people through a phone screen.

The challenges

It was one of the most demanding projects I've designed. Six problems had to be solved on the same site:

1. Two audiences, one interface. The UI had to be clear to a young learner booking car lessons and to the adults and companies booking training on every other vehicle.
2. Three domains. Lessons, training and recruitment were split across three sites, which all had to read as one ISM.
3. Booking lessons. A simple flow on top of a third-party booking API.
4. Gift vouchers. Creating and buying a voucher, kept simple from the first step.
5. Finding training courses. Search over an external API, without exposing its complexity.
6. Job vacancies. Managing openings through an external system.

The architecture

Eight separate lesson pages would be eight chances to drift, and one page trying to mean eight things converts none of them. So I split the difference: one template carrying the seven commercial categories, a layout of its own for car lessons, and one booking panel repeated everywhere it could be needed. Every design decision on the site was mine, and all of this was settled in the sitemap, before a single colour.

The callback request runs beside the booking panel because a learner's parent is often the one paying, and rarely the one on the site.

Booking, in steps

Booking a lesson asks a lot: the vehicle, the number of lessons, where, and who. The form couldn't be made short, so I split it into steps, for two reasons. Each step asks for less, so the form never looks like the wall it is. And each step saves what it has, so ISM captures a lead at every stage and can follow up with the people who stop halfway.

The pages

The phone version is not the desktop one narrowed. It gains a persistent five-slot bottom bar carrying both conversion routes and both sister businesses, and every page is reordered around the fact that the booking panel is the reason anyone came.

Beyond the templates, I designed:

• A location finder on a map of Ireland, filtered by lesson type.
• The gift vouchers: buying one in five steps, kept apart from redeeming one and from the business route.
• A free mock theory test — a reason to come back before there is a reason to book.
• A blog of guides, with related lesson categories alongside each article.

The parts I most enjoyed drawing were the map, down to its pins, and the gift voucher flow from end to end: five steps, from the terms, agreed up front, to the value, the design, a personal message and photo, a preview, and checkout — so nothing comes as a surprise after payment.

The hardest part was the least visible: detailing every form, step by step.

ISM Training

ISM Training sells courses to people and to companies: forklifts, instructors, transport and logistics, driving for work, MEWP and IPAF, safe pass and manual handling. Its sessions live in an external system, reached through an API, so the job was a simple way through them: by sector, then by type of course, then by date and place — with what's left of each session in plain sight.

The way in is the Explore courses menu: the sectors on a rail of icons, a sector's course types beside them, and each type's courses with a picture — three levels, without leaving the page.

Every course books in a panel that opens over its page, so nobody loses what they were reading. The panel lists sessions by date, filtered by course, duration, location and spots; a full session stays in the list, marked full. Booking carries on in the same panel, in steps: personal details, with more participants for a company; a confirmation of the cart; then payment, with a voucher code.

ISM Recruitment

ISM Recruitment works both sides of hiring: people looking for work as drivers, in warehouses, logistics, healthcare, construction and offices, and companies looking for staff. Its vacancies are managed in an external system, so the site puts them behind one search — industry and location — and gives each side its own door: a CV for jobseekers, a brief for employers.

Three sites, one system

Lessons, training and recruitment ran on three domains, so they had to read as one ISM. They share the header and the logo's lock-up, the components, and on a phone a five-slot bottom bar that changes its slots for each site and lights the one you're in. The menu works the same everywhere: each site opens in place, with its own sections, and the shortcuts stay below. A shared home leads into Training and Recruitment.

My part

At Loco Digital, I did the UX and the UI: the sitemap and the information architecture, the wireframes and the responsive design of every page. Loco's development team built the site on WordPress, with Elementor and JetEngine. My part in the build was UX guidance — what had to be editable in the CMS, and how each field should be named so the team at ISM would know what it is. ISM Training and ISM Recruitment, above, are mine too, on the same system.

These are my design screens, not the live site.

The team

At Loco Digital: Adam, the project manager; I designed the sites; and Loco's development team built them.