Refreshing the digital experience to engage new audiences
- Client:
- Stroke Association
- Services:
- Design, UX, Drupal
The brief.
The Stroke Association was in the midst of a significant brand refresh - including a new logo, colour pallette, brand guidelines and purpose - and preparing to launch their biggest ever above-the-line advertising campaign, Rebuilding Lives.
With an influx of new-to-the-cause visitors about to land on the website - the brand's 'shopfront' - the Stroke Association engaged Deeson to implement the new brand on the site and make improvements to key user journeys to maximise engagement and support.
The results.
Deeson collaborated with the internal team at the Stroke Association to implement their new brand identity across the organisation's existing Drupal 7 website, while maintaining accessibility and usability across devices. This included a redesign of the homepage and several other key page templates to make user journeys more intuitive, calls to action more contextually relevant, and the editor experience more immediate and flexible.
The new site launched in April, providing an improved experience for new audiences acquired through the Rebuilding Lives campaign.
Greeting new audiences with a refreshed brand and improved journeys.
The Stroke Association website, a responsive site built on Drupal 7, was last refreshed in 2017. With a new set of brand guidelines in development, featuring a light redesign of the logo, a new font, colour palette and image library, and a new description of the brand purpose, the charity needed a trusted digital partner to implement the new brand across the site while enhancing user experience for existing and anticipated new audiences.
The refreshed brand would be launched alongside the biggest above-the-line advertising campaign in the organisation's history. One of the aims of Rebuilding Lives was to bring a large new audience to the site who are relatively cold to the brand and cause, making the homepage experience more crucial than ever.
Working together to enhance experiences for editors and users.
Deeson kicked off the project with a discovery workshop involving major stakeholders, the aim of which was to establish a vision and goals for the project, outline the key requirements and gather detailed information about the existing and anticipated audiences who would be using the website. We also met with the internal development team at the Stroke Association to build and refine a backlog of development tasks necessary to implement the new designs, informed by our considerable experience of working with the Drupal content management system.
We then worked through an iterative design process, producing wireframes for a sitewide header and footer, new homepage, and primary and secondary category pages which would support key user journeys, expanded the ability of editors to add contextual calls to action and enhance search engine visibility. These wireframes were tested with real users and refined according to their feedback before being handed over to the development team in a format that was easy to implement.
Providing comprehensive support through development and deployment.
In addition to providing a development environment in which the new designs could be tested prior to deployment, we worked with the Stroke Association's php development team throughout dev testing pre- and post-deployment to the live site, ensuring that the site remained stable and secure throughout and that the new designs achieved WCAG AA compliance.
Deeson really understood our needs and exceeded our expectations with the creative execution across the site. The new homepage perfectly introduces our brand and conveys our values, particularly 'we are human'. The improvements have been very well received internally, eliciting high praise from senior leadership, and content editors are particularly pleased with the flexibility. In the first month following the refresh we've seen 33% more homepage users view at least 75% of the page and clicks on the page have increased by 395%!