Provided by Birmingham City University, BCU Advantage is a business growth network offering support to West Midlands businesses at all stages of their development. Our job was to reimagine the typical corporate website structure and create a visionary website that empowered entrepreneurs.
BCUAdvantage serves start-ups and growing businesses and needed a more visually striking, innovative website that reflected their forward-thinking vision. Their current enquiry form was crowded with services and poorly detailed, it was our job to devise a much better way to match entrepreneurs with their services. We needed to create a form through which businesses could access every service relevant to them, but which had no unnecessary options creating clutter.
Right across the BCUAdvantage website, the customer journey informed our web design and site structure. BCUAdvantage greets visitors with a call to action. Using imperatives and strong, aspirational imagery, we put the user’s intentions front and centre with the opportunity to ‘Start’, ‘Grow’ or ‘Innovate Your Business’. We consistently placed the customer at the centre of the language used on the site, with headings asking about ‘You’ or voicing the customer’s ambitions with ‘I want to’.
We built a bespoke multi-step form to better match users with BCUA services. Users click through the options, triaging them to service lists that are based on their indicated business needs. The form remembers when the user has filled it out before, or if they have accessed it from a particular service page, and uses this data to populate fields automatically. For example, if a user clicks ‘Make an Enquiry’ from a page describing the BCUA start-up incubator, the form will preselect ‘I Want to Start a Business’ and ‘Incubator’ as things they are interested in. From here the user can add services, describe the specifics of their enquiry and share their contact details.
The new website landing page immediately funnels users into the appropriate section of the website for their business needs, showing only the relevant services. Compared to the old website, accessing services offered by BCUA is now much easier to navigate and services are more targeted at relevant customers.
The multi-step form we created is more modern and supportive of users, as they only see what they might be interested in. Dull check-boxes are replaced with vibrant cards to select, and the language is simpler and more encouraging than before, making the form a process that businesses will love.
