Work

Rare Tea Company

Industry

E-commerce retailer and wholesaler

Year

2011

Project

The brief for the project was to optimise the site was for retail customers.

This was achieved through UX design activities including an in-depth competitor analysis and the deployment of personas and user scenarios to assess where the current website was and wasn't performing, and to feed findings into the site re-design.

Three reports were produced covering:

1. Google ranking for 23 key targeted search terms
2. An analysis of the Google ranking research:
• Analysis of Google Search Results
• Competitor Analysis
• Competitor benchmarking
• Personas and User Stories
• Site Metrics: Google Analytics
3. Executive summary of research and reccommendations broken down into four areas:
• Information Architecture
• Metadata and HTML recommendations
• Search engine marketing
• Content and style

Services

Competitor analysis, personas, ethnographic research, search engine optimisation, information architecure, expert usability review, content and copywriting, metedata.

Testimonial

"I was hugely impressed by the depth and thoroughness of the work Ross did. All of his conclusions made perfect sense to me."

Henrietta Lovell, founder and director of the Rare Tea Company.

UK Welcomes

Industry

Central government

Year

2009-2010

Project

UK Welcomes was created as part of a project called Point of Single Contact that was commissioned by the Department for Business (BIS).

Point of Single Contact was commissioned to fulfill the EU Services Directive. The brief was to provide a online service that would guide European businesses through obtaining licences and other 'formalities' required to do business in the UK.

The largest part of the delivery was to create a tool that would allow users to licences from any of the UK's 433 local authrities and other competent authorities and allow these authorities to manage the applications online.

There was approximatley 70 local authority licences in scope of the project, so with a varaition for each authrorites this meant that more than 30,000 transactions were delivered.

The licence application service was delivered similtaneously via Business Link.

UK Welcomes provided additional guidance and orientation for users, but was essentially built around the central 'Licences and regulations' tool.

The entire project was implemented using a user centred design methods and managed as using agile project management.

Services

Personas, card sorting, workshops, usability testing, information architecture, content planning

Business Link

Industry

Central government

Year

2007-2008, and 2011

Project

2007-2008: Personalisation strategy and regulation and compliance tools,

Re-designing two key regulation tools to enable users to quickly assess their business's regulatory requirements and also allow them to share this information across their site-wide profile to allow the delivery of personalised services on Business Link.

2011: Expert usability reviews of interactive tools.

Expert usability review of Business Link regulatory and compliance tools.

Services

Interaction design, information acrhitecture, wireframes, usability testing, expert usability review.

Testimonial

"Having worked on the Businesslink.gov programme with Ross Holloway for two years I can say that he played an invaluable role in allowing us to develop fantastic enhancements to our compliance service for businesses. Ross's keen insight and understanding our user base has had a far reaching impact the benefits of which have extended far beyond his involvement as contractor."

Cato Barend van Schalkwyk, Businesslink.gov.uk

Joseph Rowntree Foundation

Industry

Charity

Year

2007

Project

Expert usability and accessibility reviews of JRF.org.uk, as part of a larger site redesign project. The output was a report that made reccomendations for web standards and information architecture.

Services

Expert usability review, accessibility, information architecture, search engine optimisation.

Small Business Service websites

Industry

Central government

Project

Product manager of central government websites operated by the Department for Business's (at that time DTI's) Small Business Service (SBS)

The SBS corporate website – sbs.gov.uk – served as a voice for the agency, principally government facing, but also provisioning for other stakeholders siuch as journalists and academics. Managed migration of SBS.go.uk to a 'white label' of Business Link site in 2007, including transfer of services, IA re-design, and extensive stakeholder management.

The SBSextra.net (later Ourextra.net) was a very early social networking site open to small business support and government policy officials across the UK.

The Small Firms Loann Guarantee (SFLG) portal was a password protected site that allowed banks to manage loans made to small businesses that were underwritten by the givernment.

Services

Project managment, web content, accessibility, information arcitecure, interaction design.

Rustic Blue

Industry

Travel Agency

Year

2001-2003 and 2007

Project

My brief in December 2001 was to "get Rustic Blue up to the top of the search engines'. Rustic Blue's main business was, and is, the renting out of holiday homes in rural Andalucia.

The project involved spending time working alongside the company sales people understanding how they interacted with customers both via email and on the phone. Cataloguing what different types of customer's were looking for – customers with children, those travelling with elderly relatives, etc –, what were the common questions these different groups of of customers asked. Time was also spent reading through customer feedback, and analysing the web statistics.

All this reesearch was fed directly into how information, and the depth of information, was presented both via the information architecure and through the organisation of content – the most essential information going into the short menu descriptions of holiday properties and forefronted in the whole page detaile ddescriptions of individual properties. More comprehensive information about the regions of Andalucia was also created, so users could find more about their holiday destination without leaving the site.

In 2002 Rustic Blue experienced a 300% leap in the number of bookings.

Services

Search engine optimisation, search engine marketing, information architecture, competitor analysis, ethnography, web design, web development, web content and copywriting.