Image Credit : Oxford Analytica
Project Overview
Oxford Analytica Daily Brief delivers expert reports and analysis to global leaders and analysts.
Succinct and timely content informs decision making in areas affected by world events. The content is well regarded but the website was letting it down being out-of-date; content hard to find; reading experience was not at the level readers would expect.
Oxford Analytica works with the best analysts in the world, so wanted to utilise the wealth of knowledge inside the organisation, re-positioning as a thought leader within the industry.
Key focus:
Reimagining the user experience, making the site intuitive and easy-to-use, particularly for first-time users;
Developing an immersive experience for subscribers;
Creating a cohesive experience across all devices, supporting mobile and tablet users more effectively;
Designing a distinct style for the site, improving the UI, and bringing the look and feel up to date.
We started with a discovery phase, including user story mapping, stakeholder interviews and collaborative sketching workshops. Design and build of the project followed, taking approx. 4 months.
Results
site traffic up 15%
email engagement up 24%.
Retention up 13%
ROI current forecast, over 5 years, 1200%
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
names and titles for full team will have to follow. apologies.
Moray McConnachie
Director of IT
Oxford Analytica
Frances Place
Account Director
White October
Project Brief
Oxford Analytica Daily Brief delivers expert reports and analysis to the desks of global leaders and analysts.
The site was out-of-date and the content hard to find. A rethink was needed to retain existing customers and attract new ones.
Key considerations:
- Working closely with in-house development team, to ensure new site fitted within existing development infrastructure
- Introducing a ground up new site to existing customers, often resistant to change
- Working with a large number of stakeholders, including the founder, to produce a site which retained sense of history while demonstrating they’re cutting edge, at the forefront of change within the industry.
Business Goals:
- Increase email engagement by 25%
- Increase readership by 15%
- Increase retention rate by 2%
- ROI 300% over 5 years
Focus:
- Reimagining the user experience, making the site intuitive, easy to use, particularly for first time users.
- Developing an immersive experience.
- Creating a cohesive experience across all devices.
- Designing a distinct style, improving the UI, bringing the look and feel up to date.
Project Need
The old site was poorly structured with complex categorisation and search systems. Customers struggled to find what they were looking for, unaware of the breadth of content available.
Both teams focussed on developing a cohesive experience across all devices.
Considering mobile and tablet usage right from the first sketches helped us create a solid user experience across all platforms.
Our living style guide consisting of global styles, interface components and image and icon assets focussed our attention on creating a fully responsive experience. Also maintaining a transparent design and development process, becoming the central project reference point for all.
Thorough competitor analysis paired with research and inspiration boards helped us to define the design direction for the website.
We concentrated on making the reading experience a delight for the user, using large body font size, giving the content plenty of space, and keeping supplementary information minimal.
We put care and attention into the details, and the site consequently feels polished and slick.
The new service will provide clients with the levels of customisation and ease of use that they require.
User Experience
By speaking directly with users, we learnt how they would naturally look for content, allowing us to dramatically simplify the structure of the site, making it more intuitive to find and explore content - on all devices. This is particularly notable in the article pages. These long form, complex works were carefully designed to provide the user with an uninterrupted and immersive reading experience.
We encouraged OxAn to improve the structure of their content, creating a clear hierarchy on the page to cater for those readers who need to pull out key information at speed.
We also wanted to improve the customer experience on and off the site. Users can ‘favourite’ any page on the site, both articles and listings. The site can then learn what content the user is interested in, and also deliver highly relevant emails based on those selections.
A key aim of the redesign was to increase customer engagement with the site. Users can save articles of interest and collate them into ‘books’ to read, print and share. This has become an invaluable resource for many users, bringing them back to the site again and again.
Project Marketing
Internally, Oxford Analytica began an 18-month project to revolutionise the customer experience delivered by the Daily Brief, setting some very clear business objectives around engagement and money.
Externally, Customer needs were fully considered developing for them, including:
Cleaner, shorter emails, easier to read.
Removing the need for login from most email userflow.
Fully responsive mobile site
Keeping emphasis on the analytical content that users pay so much for
Not a cut-down experience. Full access to everything
Externally, once the new site was ready, results (noted earlier) were seen in response to:
Email stats
Readership
Engagement
Retention.
Project Privacy
not applicable
Digital - News & information
We all rely on digital services that broadcast or diffuse news and current affairs both locally and globally, keep us up to date with important information such as weather, warnings and hazards and allow us to quickly access information and reference resources.
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