Midland Heart - Digital Case Study

The Challenge

Midland Heart is one of the leading housing and care groups in the UK, providing homes for over 70,000 people, and delivering care and support services to 7000 customers. They wanted a new site with a strong customer focus, contemporary design, and rich, engaging content to reflect Midland Heart’s culture, values and personality, drive more traffic, and strengthen their reputation.

They also wanted the site to be developed on a simple-to-use CMS platform that enabled content to be quickly uploaded and edited, encouraging and empowering internal departments to take ownership of their content, keeping it regularly refreshed.

The website was also the first phase of Midland Heart’s journey towards channel shift, so they challenged us to build a site that would provide greatly improved access to information and online services, improving customer service and freeing up internal resources, on a platform that was ‘future-proofed’ for any further developments of online services and integration with internal systems.

Our Approach

A thorough consultancy phase included workshops with customers and staff to prioritise customer and business objectives for the website.

As part of this we developed multiple personas - archetypal web users with differing motivations for visiting the site - which enables us to map out what successful user journeys would look like. We also conducted an ‘immersion session’ to understand perceptions of the Midland Heart brand and inform choices about design, functionality and content.

This user-centred approach has enabled us to develop a site that really works from a user journey perspective – crucial given Midland Heart’s range of target audiences who are using the site for different reasons. Intuitive site architecture, logically positioned content and calls-to-action, and a clean, contemporary design combine to create a great user experience.

We also worked with Midland Heart to develop some bespoke functionality, including a 'repair responsibility tool' which is helping tenants better understand which repairs they need to fix, and which are their landlord's responsibility.