Client
Digiwijzer, POM West-Vlaanderen and a consortium of partners
Services
UX strategy, information architecture, platform development, search experience, dashboard, integrations and accessibility
Sector
Public services / digital inclusion
Timeline
first platform in 2023-2024, further development in 2025-2026
Region
Ghent: websites in Ghent · apps in Ghent
Status
Live and in ongoing development
Tech stack
Nimbu, Liquid, Alpine.js, Bootstrap, Algolia, Matomo, Brevo and the UiTdatabank API
West Flanders had plenty of services around digital inclusion, but they were scattered across organisations, regions and systems. At the same time, a broad group of partners, each with their own responsibilities, had to manage one reliable platform together.
We built Digiwijzer as a searchable portal for referrers, with a dashboard for organisations and administrators, clear roles, favourites, exports, digest emails and an integration with the UiTdatabank. Digiwijzer turns a network of partners into something usable for the people looking for local services, fast.
The first phase put the platform on the map, brought partners and services together and proved that the UiTdatabank integration was the right foundation. That successful start made clear where management could run more smoothly. The second phase built on it: less manual follow-up, better flow-through from UiT and more features for visitors and staff alike.
West Flanders has many digital inclusion services: digital support points, training, one-to-one help, workshops, public Wi-Fi and support at home. But those services were scattered across organisations, regions and systems.
Digiwijzer had to work quickly for referrers. Someone has a question about technology and needs help nearby. They want to find a digital support point, a course or an organisation that can help. They need reliable information in one place, without comparing PDFs or piecing together separate lists.
For the partners behind Digiwijzer, the difficulty lay in managing that information.
Organisations work at different scales. Some manage one local service. Others cover several municipalities or regions. Some activities are already in the UiTdatabank. Others need to be managed directly in Digiwijzer.
Then came the management questions. Who can publish? Who gets notified? Who follows up on unlinked UiT items? Who keeps location data tidy? And how do you stop a listing getting stuck because one person is away?
The brief covered both sides: a simple search experience for users, and enough structure for the network that keeps the information up to date.
The first phase focused on making the platform visible and useful, bringing partners on board and proving the UiT integration in practice. Digiwijzer brought organisations and services together while showing which processes worked well and where there was room to improve.
We built the agreements between partners into the platform. Organisations could complete their details, submit services and receive notifications when something was approved. Administrators could review listings, follow up on UiT items and publish services. New organisations and users went through onboarding, making the data more reliable step by step.
That first phase proved the foundation worked. It also showed which checks could become lighter over time and where more could happen automatically.
The second phase started from the finding that service information was good enough to make some checks lighter.
The focus shifted to smoother management while maintaining the quality already achieved:
These operational changes help keep the platform useful. Digiwijzer works better when keeping the same information current takes less effort.
A simple design principle guided our decisions: do not enter information twice when it already exists.
Digiwijzer synchronises services from the UiTdatabank daily, within the relevant regions and categories. Where possible, a UiT item is automatically linked to the right organiser using UiT IDs. The synchronisation includes titles, descriptions, contact details, prices, dates, labels, registration links and location details.
Some UiT items are ready to use immediately. Others need an organiser or extra context for referrers. Some organisations want automatic publication; others want to review first. The synchronisation does much of the work, and the management rules determine when that information can safely move through.
We also built a separate structure for locations. Locations imported through UiT get their own record in Digiwijzer and can be reused. When a library, service centre or digital support point appears regularly, its address and accessibility information only need to be entered once.
Visitors simply search by place, date, service type or organiser.
The public side of Digiwijzer needed to be fast above all.
Analytics later confirmed what had guided the UX decisions: location drives almost everything. Between November 2024 and January 2026, the platform recorded 12,347 unique visitors. Visitors actively used filters in 37.77% of visits to the services page. Postcode appeared in 86.87% of those filtered visits, and distance in 56.97%.
People use Digiwijzer as a working tool: what is available nearby, and where can I refer someone?
Further development refined that search experience. Searching around an address within a radius needs different logic from searching within a municipality. Online services have no postcode but still need to be found. Referrers who regularly use the same listings want to save, print or export them.
That led to favourites, exports, better filters, location and organiser filters, and digest emails for new services by region or organiser.
On a platform about digital inclusion, accessibility cannot be an afterthought. The follow-up development took WCAG 2.1 level AA as an explicit work item, from contrast and focus states to semantic markup, clear forms, error messages and keyboard navigation.
Digiwijzer is now a live platform where referrers, organisations and administrators can each do their work without users needing to understand what happens behind the scenes.
Digital inclusion services from all over West Flanders come together in one searchable gateway.
Referrers search by location, type of service, date, organiser and other filters that match their daily work.
Organisations and administrators work in dashboards that respect their roles, responsibilities and regions.
UiT content flows in automatically and can be linked, enriched or published. Recurring locations are reused.
Favourites, exports and digest emails support people who use Digiwijzer regularly. The second phase makes that work faster and reduces manual follow-up.
The result is not one feature. It is the fact that a broad partnership now has one shared tool that stays simple for the end user.
The first phase gave Digiwijzer a solid foundation and put the platform on the map. The second phase built on it with less manual work, less waiting and more trust in the structure and the automatic flow-through.
That's how Digiwijzer grew from a successful first version into a faster platform with more features for visitors and staff alike.
Meanwhile Digiwijzer lives on beyond its original Digibanken context. The consortium continues working on the platform's future with its own resources and provincial funding. Conversations are underway about a broader Flemish rollout, and interest in the project keeps growing. Four webinars together drew more than 250 registrations.
Digiwijzer solves a recognisable problem: many services, many partners and plenty of goodwill only become truly useful when someone can quickly find the right help in them.
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A platform where businesses find the right partner in the social economy, built for the Flemish provinces.
A website that turns scientific knowledge about health into clear information for a broad audience.
We can help work out the structure that makes it simple to use.
You'll speak straight away with someone who digs into the actual problem.
