“What set us apart was the way in which we managed to embed our new brand into the design and UX of our website.”
Interview with Dominic Billington, Head of Marketing and Digital Experience at York St. John University
The “What education marketers are saying” series shares insight from marketers working in the education sector, whether that’s for universities, agencies or student communities.
Interview
Kyle (Education Marketer): What do you think clinched the deal on winning the award for Best Website at Heist?
Dominic: I think what set us apart was the way in which we managed to embed our new brand into the design and UX of our website.
We were working on the design of our new website in parallel with the creation of our new brand identity. This meant that we were able to embed our new brand into pretty much everything on the website, from how our navigation menu is animated to the way in which we use photography.
Kyle: Looking at the York St John website, you’ve clearly “cut the fluff” and focused on key user journeys. What was the biggest hurdle in making this happen and how did you overcome it?
Dominic: By far the biggest challenge we had was to get stakeholders on board with adopting a user-centred approach. For example, we completely changed our information architecture to move away from departmental silos to a topic-based structure. This was a big change for the University and something that we’re still trying to overcome today.
We have used research from our users and Google Analytics, data to show stakeholders why this is the right approach and how the performance of our website continues to improve.
Support from the Senior Leadership Team has also proved vital.
Kyle: Your York St John’s website is a rare example of creative, branding and web design working in harmony. What do you have in place to keep it that way?
Dominic: We were keen to make sure that our brand was consistent across all of our online and offline channels.
The starting point was to agree on a set of design principles that would be applied by all of our designers. We then held regular design crits across our teams to share how we were applying these principles.
To help colleagues outside our team understand how to apply our brand, we created a digital brand style guide. Our website is underpinned by an external pattern library of components, based on the atomic design model.
This allows us to continually develop our main website while providing a set of patterns to be used on other platforms.
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