Case study

Putting carers first at every move

Delivering an engaging and accessible website that delivers for their users

Client: The Carers' Centre website Sector: Healthcare

Highlights

100%

increase in traffic to the site

17hrs

of user testing

The brief

BANES Carers Centre are providers of respite services, advice and information for the carers community for the Bath and North East Somerset. 

To understand what carers really needed and how digital solutions could meet those needs, we aimed to create an engaging and accessible website that delivered for their users. Our goal was to place carers at the center of every stage of design and development. Additionally, we shared our learnings beyond the people we served by making everything open source and available to every carer or organisation supporting carers.

What we did

User experience
Website design and development 
Google analytics

Visit the website

Desktop view of The Carers' Centre website homepage

The solution

As part of a wider digital transformation program, we embarked on a detailed discovery to understand carers’ needs. We conducted multiple user workshops and 1:1 sessions with young carers, adult carers, and the parents of young carers. To ensure their voices were heard and accurately represented, we involved carers directly in the process through participatory workshops.

In addition to open sourcing, we catalogued the journey with BANES on Medium, allowing other organisations to share our learnings.

What we did

We defined detailed user profiles and journeys to establish clear wireframes for the new site, completely revising the previous design. We tested every stage with users to ensure everything was grounded in and led by their feedback, continually iterating based on user insight.

Our user profiling and detailed user journeys fully captured the needs and behaviours of carers, which informed the collaborative design of the website's structure and functionality during wireframe workshops. Furthermore, we translated their existing print branding into a digital format to maintain a cohesive identity.

Leveraging Umbraco and Azure charity credits, we built a robust website infrastructure and seamlessly integrated it into Salesforce, streamlining their operations and enhancing the user experience.

Technology we used

Umbraco CMS
Uskinned
Azure
Integrated into Campaign Monitor
Salesforce
Stripe / GoCardless

We're so glad we found Digital Wonderlab to partner with. They really listened to what we were trying to achieve, worked to unskilled us as a team.in user led design and engaged in helping us tell our story on top of delivering a fantastic site for our users! We're looking forward to working with them much more in the future

Janine Woodward-Grant , Deputy CEO

The Carers' Centre

The impact

Our comprehensive approach, which included 17 hours of user testing, ensured that the final website perfectly captured the needs of carers. The project delivered a new, integrated, user-led website that elevated strategic priorities and ambitions of the organisation. We successfully:

Attracted and retained users by providing greater value to members and enabling the website to be a platform for the collective voice carers.
Increased public awareness of the charity.
Co-created the website through user research, testing, and feedback, ensuring it considered accessibility and provided an immersive and engaging experience on both mobile and desktop.
Seamlessly integrated the website into Salesforce to streamline processes and deliver enhanced functionality.
Built the website on Umbraco Content Management System (CMS).
Provided full support and continual development through a managed service.

This meticulous process led to a highly effective and user-friendly website that met and exceeded the project's goals.