Showcase

Established in 1996, Oxford University Saïd Business School is one of Europe’s youngest and most entrepreneurial business schools. It is one of the top three in the UK and combines academia with a practical understanding of business and wealth creation.  Design UK was appointed as the School's website design and usability agency and were asked to create a brand new site to take it to the next level.

The Challenges:

• Create a logical, concise and engaging experience
  Previously, the School’s site design was dated and with over 1500 pages there was very little real estate available to highlight the depth of content within it.
• Engage all audiences
  The final website needed to communicate and engage each of the School’s main audiences: potential and current students, postgrads looking into MBAs, potential investors, the press, and business people.
• Meet the requirements of 10 research centres
  The School has ten different research centres and various different undergraduate, MBA and masters programmes. This means that there were no less than 25 different parties who all had their own requirements for the new site. The final design needed to be repurposed for each of the 10 centres and meet their individual objectives whilst sharing a consistent look and feel.

The Solution – Reusable templates with Web 2.0 features
We set up internal workshops with representatives from all research centres with the initial phase being to agree the primary aims of the main site. This involved analysis of each audience group to ascertain what they wanted to get from the site, for example how it could engage with investors. The 25 parties worked together to establish exactly what was needed on the site in order to support these primary aims. We then started work on a design and information architecture that would meet those requirements.

The final solution included:

• A ‘toolkit’ of best practise design guidelines to empower the School to build any number of pages with a consistent appearance at any level in the site.
• A set of templates for the research centres to enable them to embed video throughout the site, including those of conferences, meetings and promotional items. Each centre now has a modular homepage, but with a slightly individual look and feel at the top. Overall however it is the same branding and main design, but each centre has different colours for differentiation.
• Mega menus in order to visually demonstrate the depth of content and make it more user-friendly.
• More interactive pages with many Web 2.0 features, including areas with interchangeable promotions - a massive improvement on the previous static website.

The Results – An engaging and well designed website
We delivered an extremely effective strategy for redesigning the School’s main site, while ensuring that each research centre’s microsites had a similar look and feel including the stand-alone Centre for Business Taxation. The new website now gives the School a highly professional look and feel that engages and communicates with all key audiences and provides an intuitive call to action on courses, research, research posts, post grad degrees and investor benefits.

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