UK Online – where every click counts

UK Online asked Seren to re-design their user experience to achieve: a simple sign up process, the ability for customers to start their journey from different products, increased stickiness, effective up selling and useful account management.

The client:

UK Online offers business broadband services for home workers and small enterprises.  The brand, part of Easynet, prides itself on business grade services at consumer prices.

 

The issue:

During the latter part of 2007, UK Online wished to expand its range of products and services to include domain name services, hosting, and email/web management, alongside a more comprehensive choice of broadband options.

The objective was not only to offer a breadth of service, but also to enable users to buy a range of products and services from a single source.  The UK Online website needed to be able to deliver an engaging customer experience to users despite having a more complex and varied product offering: this was particularly important as UK Online relied on their web presence to encourage customers to trust the company with business-critical services.

UK Online also needed to consolidate a number of legacy systems to create an integrated solution to users. 

 

Seren’s Design Actions:

Seren played a pivotal role in helping the production and technical teams to define the experience they wanted for customers.

Initially Seren interviewed key product owners to understand the requirements of the business and the scope of products and services that would be offered from the new website. 

Seren defined various different user scenarios and user flows to ensure both a consistency of experience and ease of use in understanding and selecting multiple services from the UK Online website.

Seren worked with the in-house marketing team to define the look and feel of the new website, creating a prototype for testing with groups of users.

The testing enabled Seren to make a number of amendments based on user feedback and to provide recommendations regarding further requirements to UK Online’s management team.

With these amendments included, Seren created a functional specification document which was used by the development team to build the new website. 

 

Results:

Seren made several recommendations to UK Online management team regarding both the look and feel of their website and, more critically, creating an effective customer journey, particularly with multiple new products that could be purchased either separately or jointly.

Chris Stening from UK Online said: “Seren was quick to understand our issues.  The company worked well as part of our team and created a comprehensive functional specification for our new website. We were delighted with the outcome.”

 

Conclusions:

Online brands rely on capturing user interest from the outset, not least in highly competitive markets such as the provision of broadband and web services.  Equally critical is delivering an engaging, brand positive experience through discovery and purchasing.  Users are unlikely to be forgiving of a poor experience or rely on customer support calls to guide them through the process.

For UK Online, more products and services could not mean more complexity.  By engaging with Seren, UK Online was able to develop a website that offered more, but did so with less complication.

12 November 2009