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Brief
How do you improve upon the online phone book without overcomplicating the concept?
BT wanted to release a business directory website that would not only enable people to quickly and easily find businesses anywhere in the UK, but also offer features that would keep users coming back again and again to use the site. They needed a concept that would energise the online business directory proposition with room to grow and evolve in the future.
Instinct worked in partnership with communications agency AMV BBDO and technical development partners SMBLive to develop a proposition that would take the online business directory to where it needed to be
Strategy
For BT Exchanges to succeed, we felt it needed to offer users something more than the typical online directory. We recognised that BT Directories provide powerful searches, but we wanted to extend the concept of the directory and give people plenty of reasons to come back to the site again and again.
We put together a core team of user research experts, user experience architects, senior designers, copywriters, content strategists and producers who all worked closely together to produce deliverables to tight deadlines. In addition, a dedicated team of programme managers, project managers, business analysts and account directors liaised with senior members of BT to ensure that the site we were developing would meet business as well as user needs.
Execution
The project started with a series of ‘hothouses’, at which BT brought together technical, design, usability, business, marketing and sales experts. Over the course of these intensive sessions Instinct produced the first clickable prototype, which helped set the vision and expectations for what the new site would become.
Instinct was placed at the centre of the project, coordinating the efforts of the communications, advertising and technical partners. Our team was ultimately responsible for the site’s architecture, design and usability, including SEO and accessibility concerns.
We conducted user research and competitor analysis to define user needs. At the same time our business analyst collected key information about the business requirements for the site from BT stakeholders. We balanced what we learned about user needs and business requirements to ensure that they didn’t contradict each other. Throughout the project, our user research, usability testing and business analysis helped keep the project on track.
We hosted several stakeholder workshops with key individuals at BT as well as our partners AMV BBDO and SMBLive. These workshops helped us understand what BT wanted from the Exchanges website, but they also served two other important purposes: they helped internal BT stakeholders hone and refine their ideas about what they wanted, and they helped those same stakeholders come to an agreement on what they expected to achieve with the site. Throughout the design and development of BT Exchanges, workshops were a key ingredient in the success of each phase in the project lifecycle.
Our Experience Architects used the findings from the workshops, along with the user research and competitor analysis to create detailed user journeys, which outlined how a diverse range of users would typically interact with the site. Detailed wireframes and specification documentation were generated outlining core features and functions with consideration to business rules, UML, process flows, user research and best practice analysis. In parallel the visual design team began exploring and developing the look and feel of the site’s user interface and brand experience. Following on from each stage of wireframe and visual design, interactive prototypes were produced and tested with people from many different backgrounds and user groups.
We worked in collaboration with accessibility experts Ability Net and usability experts Flow Interactive to ensure users from all walks of life could easily access and use the site. The designs were tested with a diverse group of target users, including casual and heavy internet users of all ages and users with special web browsing needs, such as individuals with visual and hearing impairments. The findings helped us refine and improve the designs and the user experience of the proposition.
According to Bruce Abercromby, GM of Strategy and Development at BT Exchanges, the new site hasn’t failed to impress: “Instinct’s skills in consumer understanding, creativity and robust design have produced a site with genuine value-add that users just want to keep coming back to,” He said.
Results
Creating an online business directory that meets the needs of a diverse audience means understanding a wide variety of users and testing with them continually, and that’s what made the BT Exchanges business directory a success.
Wildfire Word of Mouth conducted post-launch user analysis which found that 70% of users thought the new BT Exchanges site was easy to navigate. 70% also said they would visit the site in the future.
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