Crown Workspace

Project Type - Website Redesign
Date of Completion - April 2018
Project Duration - 3 weeks

Aims and Objectives

Crown Worldwide a global business who have helped millions of families relocate their lives throughout the world, with over 10,000 clients in 54 countries.

An internal brand refresh prompted a redesign of several of their suite of websites, many of which were no longer fit for purpose and were running on a legacy CMS. This larger project included the redesign of their Workspace business.

The project had a small budget and a tight deadline so it was essential that we worked closely with stakeholders from around the business.

A new responsive lead-generation website
Identification of website users
Mapping of clear user journeys for each user
Reuse of content from their existing website

My Role

My role was Lead UX Designer, and it was my job to define the business requirements, architect the site and oversee its creation. I lead a team of visual designers and developers and worked closely with stakeholders from around the business from concept to launch.

Aims and Objectives

Thatchers are a family cider makers with a rich history. Currently the second-largest cider brand in the UK, they’ve been growing apples and producing cider from their home in Somerset for over 100 years.

After a rebranding effort that covered both the company and a number of their product ranges, Thatchers needed a new website. They were keen to simplify and modernise their site, moving away from text-heavy pages to a more visual brand experience.

Method

Stakeholder Workshop

We gathered stakeholders together in a workshop to understand organisational goals and to focus their attention onto solving problems focused around the needs of the users of the website. I facilitated the sessions and ran a serious of group tasks designed to get the stakeholders thinking and working together.

It was crucial that we were designing with the customer in mind, so I ran a series of tasks that got the groups thinking about their customers and their goals, motivations, fears, and frustrations. The result was a set of personas that were presented and critiqued by the wider group.

We then mapped out perceived journeys for each user before card sorting the existing content into a new structure that might make sense to our personas and their journeys. I wanted to avoid stereotyping as much as possible, so I asked the groups to draw on their experience of dealing with customers and provide real-world examples as much as possible.

The client had gone through a brand refresh so much of the visual design was already set, however, we needed to define layouts and how we might present the content in a way that told a compelling story and set them apart from their competitors.

Before the workshop, I’d asked for stakeholders to send example websites they liked from within their industry and from outside of their industry. I ran a 20-second test exercise (LINK) and we picked out examples of the kinds of layouts that might suit our new website.

In groups we then began to wireframe key pages on paper, giving feedback and iterating layouts increasing the fidelity each round eventually incorporating real content.

We reached the end of the workshop with an agreed set of personas, user journeys, sitemap, key wireframes, and importantly a shared understanding and ownership of the assets.

After the workshop I spent a few days digitising and refining the personas, user journeys and wireframes, adding detail and holding feedback sessions with the visual designers and developers to make sure we were creating something that could be designed and coded on time and budget.

The client would be responsible for reorganising content so for some of the more text-heavy pages I designed a set of reusable content modules. We arranged these modules into example wireframes for the client to give them a steer on what the page could look like.