YoungMinds
Project:
Website redesign
Work:
Strategy, UX, Brand, Development
Results:
50%+
Reduction in administration time spent handling calls
20%+
Increase in the total number of pages visited
<50%+
average bounce rate achieved
Visit:
youngminds.org.uk
A digital platform offering content and support for young people to improve their mental health.
Yoyo were approached by the charity YoungMinds with a request to help update, re-design and re-develop their existing website within an aggressive 3 month project window to coincide with the 2017 London Marathon – a major milestone for the charity. During the discovery phase, we worked closely with the key stakeholders to set out clear objectives for the website which were defined and used throughout the project.
4 objectives
-
1.
Foster innovation to meet the needs of vulnerable and excluded children and young people.
-
2.
Promote good mental health to more children and young people than ever before.
-
3.
Champion the voices of young people and parents to influence mental health policy and practice
-
4.
Inspire excellence to achieve transformed, integrated services.
Having completed a full UX review of all existing insight provided by YoungMinds, along with further research, we were able to validate and develop the sitemap and architecture to make sure it met objectives and worked across a variety of user personas. This helped form a solid basis for us to progress into the next phase of design and development.
As always Yoyo are incredibly accommodating and proactive. You have reassured teams around our organisation that website development is in good hands.
The design and experience
As the design work commenced, we used the newly developed YoungMinds brand and guidelines to provide a site design which was fresh, clean, current and engaging. The site needed to reflect the youthfulness of the target audience, yet remain professional and uncluttered to make sure users could easily navigate through the pages to get the information and support from YoungMinds they required.
As we moved into development, there were also areas of e-commerce that focused our attention.
These were:
- Online donations (one-off and regular direct debit payments)
- Publications
- Training courses
In order to achieve this, we used Ucommerce – Umbraco's fully integrated e-commerce module. The module allowed for a smooth integration of the above items, and provided the client with everything they needed to fulfil, validate and report on user purchases.
Throughout this project, we considered YoungMinds cloud-based fundraising and relationship management solution, Raiser's Edge, ensuring our work complemented the functionality of the CRM and simplified the workflow for the YoungMinds team.
The website is fully PCI-compliant, handing off to SagePay for credit card payment authorisation & capturing.
The website is built on the latest version of Umbraco 7 and hosted in Umbraco Cloud / Azure, with the companion e-commerce module, Ucommerce, added in order process one-off online donations and to facilitate the purchasing of printed leaflets and health-related publications.
Both Umbraco and Ucommerce are frameworks to build sites from, rather than off-the-shelf products, ready to be used in a plug and play fashion. As such the following key technical functions had to be built from scratch:
- Programmatic checkout for one-off donations (as well as the traditional check out process for physical publication orders)
- A custom tax service; only applying VAT to certain products
- Custom discounting based on volume of product type on order
- Custom Shipping Service; applying various shipping fees based on the combination of contents and volume on the order
- Sending custom “back office” confirmation emails to specific areas of the business depending on what was ordered (as well as standard order confirmation to the customer)
- Various custom back office financial reports
- Automatic nightly generation of an extract file containing the latest purchase orders, sent via FTP to a 3rd party shipping company
The front end of the website was built using industry recognised pre-processors; Yarn, Stylus and TypeScript and AJAX calls for adding items to your basket, in order to not lose context within the website.
The results
The site was successfully launched in mid April ahead of the important YoungMinds delivery milestone – the 2017 London Marathon. A significant event aptly re-named "The Mental Health Marathon" in support of the hugely significant Heads Together charity campaign, championed by the Royal Family and of which YoungMinds are an official partner.
YoungMinds users were reviewing the site within minutes of the live launch with various users on social media providing overwhelmingly positive feedback
"So easy to navigate"
"Your website is fantastic"
"Brilliant website for young people"
"Easy to navigate, accessible information"
"I can't even remember what the old site looks like! It's great!"
