In this first of two posts on campaign landing pages, Josh Morris (Senior Front End Developer) and Jamie Forsyth (UX/UI Designer) discuss streamlining the process of creating this type of content at the University.
In the past, the Digital Experience team has been very reactive. A stakeholder would give us a task like “I want a new website”, and we would go off and build it. Sounds OK on the face of it, right? However, this type of reactive approach is an inefficient way of working, and more often than not wastes time and resources.
Our team is trying to pivot to a more strategic approach – identifying and solving problems in a more centralised and reusable way.
Campaign landing pages
Our first foray into this new approach was focused on a project we ran with our marketing team colleagues around digital advertising campaigns. Specifically, the creation of ‘campaign landing pages’ that people click through to if they are interested in an advert.
The University runs many of these types of ad campaigns with the help of agencies. This is a big commitment of media spend, and campaigns can sometimes overlap or compete across different parts of the University. This leads to duplicated effort, with each landing page produced having a different look and feel, also causing inconsistent branding and user experience.
We want teams at the University to be able to focus on solving their problems, not repeating and recreating the same work – and be able to do all this at a fraction of the cost!
Reusable templates and combinable blocks
Our team identified that we could solve these problems by creating reusable templates and combinable ‘blocks’, which could be used to build campaign landing pages in a flexible and user/business focused way, as part of our new Digital Design System (we’ll be officially launching this soon, and blogging about it here).
A vital part of the work was to conduct user testing to validate the landing page designs and the onward journey, giving us valuable insight into what could be improved in both content and UI. This provided enough information to be confident that our work addressed the needs and expectations of the target audience.
We chose to focus on campaign landing pages not because of highest user need, or business need, but because it was something collectively we could achieve now, quickly.
We used available stakeholders, building up collective understanding about what the design system can do to help us and the wider University.
Putting it into practice
In part 2 of this post we look at our sprint approach to this work.
If you’d like to explore how the Digital Experience team can support you on a project you’re planning or working on, fill in our digital projects support request form (University of Bristol only).