Understanding the Sector
The sustainability space is crowded and often confusing. The pressures of creating and maintaining sustainable business practices often present new challenges for businesses, but it’s not just about saving the planet. The practices which are being put forward by early-adopters and innovators, in most industries, are sustainable. However, they’re also beneficial for a business’s bottom line, whether through optimising and reducing waste, or generating genuine opportunities for growth.
Understanding Anthesis
Anthesis are uniquely action-driven facilitators of sustainable growth. They work with companies through the ‘Activator Journey’, unlocking the potential inherent in the businesses. Working through the whole process of analytics, solutions, and implementation, they are uniquely placed to be able to work on big-picture strategy and building solutions, whether digital or physical.
Understanding the Stakeholders
It’s a vast sector, and the clients could come from a number of types of business. Anthesis has global reach, and the challenges which businesses face are different country-to-country, as are the selling points. We needed to speak to a broad selection of stakeholders, and get to know the organisation as widely as possible.
By interviewing and consulting with members of the organisation around the globe and conducting surveys with Anthesis’s clients, we were able to establish that the most impactful aspect of the site for users was finding information relevant to their sector. Whether clients are looking to engage on a huge strategy initiative or a smaller request, each client group will be looking for answers to very particular questions.
Information Architecture
Tiered Service Architecture
This provoked an interesting question, which would become the focus of our work on information architecture. The range of services offered by Anthesis is in the hundreds, and users are coming to the site looking for a particular service. Not only that, but people in different sectors (and different countries) are liable to refer to services by different names…
Prior to our arrival a brand positioning exercise had been undertaken to understand this service architecture, which was broken down into:
- Six service areas, under each of which multiple specific services
- A three-step “Activator Journey”, which takes clients from scoping and analytics through delivery to implementation
It was important that we devise an information architecture and UX which allowed users to quickly identify the service area which they fell under, as well as the step in the activator journey which they were at.
Product Roadmap
It was understood that the first release would be an MVP. This would allow Anthesis and Crucible working together to test the site and get a better understanding of how the site was being used.
Also, it would allow us to test on one market (United Kingdom), before rolling out releases with different languages internationally.
We were required to build a site which would essentially function as a chassis, and have begun work on Phase 2, which will include more CMS functionality, further languages, project-specific microsites, a visual overhaul of a client area, and the bringing of satellite sites of Anthesis’s corporate group under one umbrella.
UI Design
Anthesis offers the sustainability sector as an opportunity for its clients: they are not simply reacting to environmental pressures, but helping clients to grow into a sustainable space. This required a great deal of professionalism and sheen to the finished product, so that Anthesis would align with large-scale commercial goals.
Typography and a stripped-back version of the Anthesis brand colours were selected to emphasise clarity and white space. A subtle light refraction element was chosen to accompany imagery, a reference to the world of environmental art, which uses refraction as a motif.
The pages were designed in such a way as to maximise the capacity for a modular, component-based CMS approach. Cleanliness was paramount, and all of the modules were designed and tested with a view to their arrangement being changeable.
WordPress and Content Migration
The old site was largely being edited using Hubspot’s CMS, which limited users to templated layouts. We recommended that the site be built on the WordPress CMS, which would allow us to create modular layouts and maximise CMS editability.
A WordPress Dashboard was customised, making it very easy to edit the page, and guidance was given.
An extensive content migration was undertaken, moving the Hubspot content onto the WordPress dashboard. Hubspot was instead integrated throughout the site to ensure that its marketing and tracking capabilities were still being maximised.