The challenge

The British Business Bank’s (BBB) digital landscape was complex, reflecting the complexity of their large, multi-departmental organisation. Its ecosystem was made up of a number of brands and websites, dedicated to serving an extremely diverse audience with very specific needs. Everyone from career hunters, to start ups, fund managers and more. While the experience might have been considered at an individual level, it had never been explored across the estate with a view to helping end users navigate it efficiently.

And it wasn’t just external users that were facing complications. Internally the teams were tackling sites on different platforms, with outdated components and, as a result, an over reliance on external agencies to support them in managing their sites efficiently.

BBB asked us to help them refine their cross-site experience, and recommend the best approach for streamlining a consistently accessible experience: technically, functionally, and visually.

Why Cohaesus?

BBB needed a partner who understood that digital platforms are simply the enablers of great experiences. As a platform agnostic agency, we were unhampered by any preconceived notions of what the solution to their challenges should be. We started by ascertaining the optimal experience and allowed that to dictate the implementation. This gave BBB the opportunity to get a fresh perspective on their options for their digital estate.

We believe that our greatest digital products are achieved at the intersection of our digital expertise and our clients’ expert domain knowledge. That is why we take a collaborative approach throughout, with BBB directly and, equally importantly, their users.

Our approach

With a significant number of stakeholders involved it was vital that we engaged the appropriate parties as quickly as possible to create the momentum and focus that would keep them engaged for the journey.

We ran three parallel workstreams, immersing ourselves in stakeholder interviews, content audits and analysis of the current experience, content and technical architecture. We could then start the mapping process for our identified user journeys, defining content ontologies and completing an in depth review of the front end experience. We also reviewed the CMS experience for internal users to identify pain points and potential opportunities.

Once we had completed our immersion, we developed a new world information architecture and used the findings from our audits to conduct a gap analysis. That allowed us to define our crawl, walk, run approach to implementation strategies and roadmap.

Once stakeholders were aligned on the vision for the future, we explored potential platform solutions and made our recommendations.

The outcome

First and foremost we defined a clear digital vision focusing on the empowerment of both external and internal users to self-serve and achieve their goals online. For external users that was to educate them to a point where they could take a clear next step. For internal users, it was to encourage them to do better to inspire businesses across the UK to develop and grow.

Once we had defined our north star, we designed an approach that drove users through a triage process, consolidated the estate, and defined consistent navigation patterns and components to create a more cohesive experience across the sites, as well as development efficiencies. We also recommended a content hub approach to remove any duplication and increase efficiencies in how the creation and linking of content is managed, and provided platform recommendations for the entire digital estate.

As part of the roadmap, we will begin the implementation of the proposed platform and continue to develop key components of this digital transformation process, such as a content strategy, target operating model, personalisation and omni channel strategies.