Project: A new updated, responsive website

Client: Buckinghamshire Business First

Category: Business 2 Business

Responsibilities:
Concepting, User testing, User research, User experience, Workshops, Defining KPI's MVP roadmap development, Brand identity and Responsive UI design

The challenge

Buckinghamshire Business First (BBF) are an organisation with the sole aim of helping businesses in the "Entrepreneurial Heart of Britain" grow. Labeled as a "growth hub", their role is to provide the link between public policy and the local business community, to bring together the collective voice of Buckinghamshire's businesses. With government funding running out, BBF's challenge to us was to begin to generate revenue through previously free members and work out the best way to communicate this to their users.

Our approach

To get an understanding of what its like to run a business in Buckinghamshire we started with a discovery phase. We ran several research streams, including surveys, competitor reviews, online user testing and face-to-face proposition testing. We worked in fortnightly iterative design sprints, each sprint we designed, built and user tested feature ideas using prototypes. Workshops and feature demos kept key stakeholders up to speed with our progress. We used Slack and Trello to ensure collaboration was constant and pain-free.

An even mix of features across the entire end-to-end customer journey was important because we wanted to ensure both business owners and the general public had a pleasurable experience when using the service. We did this by creating a personalised view of the website for business owners, enabling them to quickly react to new leads and developing news stories.

We designed for mobile devices first, incorporating features from a prioritised roadmap for MVP. We wanted to ensure all features were capable of working across multiple devices in a consistent way and performed well on-the-go. We refined our features as we went on and pivoted on a few occasions as priorities changed and new insights came to light.

The results

Within the first week BBF started to take signups from local businesses via the website. Positive feedback on the new site and it's feature-set was received from their membership base. We completed the project on time and on budget.

We are particularly proud of the revenue generating opportunities that were created for BBF as a result of the website redesign. The organisation exists for the benefit of it's membership base and without those it would fail to exist. So to create a platform to help generate leads for companies like ourselves was really exciting.

“Furthermore were commissioned to design our new website. They are true advocate of user led design and proactively sought feedback along the way. This collaborative approach resulted in a really positive user experience meaning our members are engaged with and come back to the website time and again. The mobile experience is really innovative and is a delight to use.” - Sarah Randall, BBF

Since launch more people have been viewing the the member directory and events listings than they were before the redesign and the member's signed in dashboard, a page that didn’t exist before, has been attracting a significant number of regular views.

View the site by following this link; Buckinghamshire business first.

We are still heavily involved in the BBF project and love working with the team and hope to be involved in future iterations and feature enhancements.

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