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
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 plenty of services around digital inclusion. Digital help points, training courses, one-on-one support, workshops, public wifi, help at home. But those services were scattered across organisations, regions and systems.
For referrers, Digiwijzer had to be fast. Someone has a digital question, is looking for help nearby, wants to know where a digital help point is, which course exists, or which organisation can help. The back end should never be felt. No PDFs side by side. No lists someone has to piece together. No doubt about whether the information is still correct.
For the partners behind Digiwijzer, the difficulty was precisely that back end.
Not every organisation works at the same scale. Some manage a single local service. Others follow up several municipalities or regions. Some activities are already in the UiTdatabank. Others need to be managed directly in Digiwijzer.
On top of that came the management questions. Who may publish? Who gets a notification? Who follows up unlinked UiT items? Who keeps locations clean? And how do you prevent services from getting stuck because one person is away?
So the assignment sat on two levels at once: a simple search experience for the user, and enough structure for the network that keeps that information up to date.
The first phase focused on making the platform visible and usable, getting partners on board and proving the UiT integration in practice. It worked: Digiwijzer brought organisations and services together, and at the same time gave a clear picture of which processes ran well and where there was still ground to gain.
We translated the agreements between partners into the platform itself. Organisations could complete their details, submit services and receive notifications when something was approved. Administrators could review entries, follow up UiT items and publish services. New organisations and users got an onboarding flow, so the data became more reliable step by step.
That successful first phase proved the chosen foundation worked. It also showed which checks could be lightened over time and where more automatic flow-through was possible.
The second phase started from the observation that the quality of the content was good enough to lighten some of the checks.
The focus shifted to smoother management, without losing the quality that had been built up:
These are operational interventions, but they determine whether a platform like this stays alive. Digiwijzer works better when people have to push less to keep the same information current.
A simple design principle helped guide the choices: never enter information twice if it already exists.
Digiwijzer synchronises services from the UiTdatabank daily, within the right region and categories. Where possible, a UiT item is automatically linked to the right organiser based on UiT IDs. The synchronisation brings along title, description, contact details, pricing, dates, labels, registration links and location data, among other things.
Then comes the nuance. Some UiT items are immediately usable. Others first need an organiser, or extra context for referrers. Some organisations want automatic publication, others want to review first. So the sync does a lot of work, and the management model determines when that work can safely flow through.
We also built a separate location structure. Locations that come in via UiT get their own place in Digiwijzer and can be reused. If a library, service centre or digital help point comes up often, address and accessibility information doesn't have to be entered again every time.
For the visitor, all of that stays invisible. They simply search by place, date, type of service or organiser.
The public side of Digiwijzer had to be fast, above all.
The analytics later confirmed what was already baked into the UX choices: location drives almost everything. Between November 2024 and January 2026 the platform counted 12,347 unique visitors. On the services page, 37.77% of visits actively used filters. Postcode appeared in 86.87% of those filtered visits, distance in 56.97%.
So people don't use Digiwijzer as a brochure. They use it as a working tool: what exists in my area, and where can I send someone?
In the follow-up development, that search experience was sharpened further. An address with a distance radius needs different logic than searching within a municipality. Online services have no postcode but still need to be findable. Referrers who often use the same entries want to save, print or export them.
That's why features arrived such as favourites, export, better filters, location and organiser filters, and digest emails for new services per 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 a live platform today where referrers, organisations and administrators can each do their own work without the user ever having to understand the back end.
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.
