Case Study

Brief

• Cats Protection approached Experience Solutions at the very early stages of planning their new website. They had a lot of ideas and a clear idea of what they needed from a business perspective, but were unsure what their users needed
• The web team had a number of different internal clients to satisfy, who all had their own needs and requirements
• The team was aware of the large array of different website users that they needed to satisfy, but were unclear on how to prioritise them

Strategy

• We knew they had a large redesign project ahead of them so they would not have a lot of spare budget at this early phase of the project. Experience Solutions felt that a complete review of their current site was required.
• We encouraged them to understand the strengths and limitations of their current website alongside the strengths and weaknesses of their key competitors in their charity sector

Execution

• Firstly, Experience Solutions helped the Cats Protection team to agree on who their potential users are. We conducted a user profiling workshop with the team and invited helpline staff, who had direct contact with users, to contribute
• After agreeing the priority users for the new site, and assigning business goals for each, we conducted a user experience audit of the current website and its key competitors
• The websites were reviewed from the perspective of each of the priority users. We set out to complete typical goals with each of the websites and recorded all the positive and negative aspects of the user journey
• For each site we compiled a set of user experience scores along with key learning points. We also prioritised recommendations to help the Cats Protection web team plan the best user experience possible for their new site

Results

• The team was able to focus on which users they needed to support best and which areas of their site they needed to focus more redesign effort
• Our report provided the foundation for a brief to website design agencies
• The web team clearly understood where their site was in terms of user experience compared to their competitors, and had a benchmark score to measure improvements against