Building our customer-centric website

What does it take to create a truly customer-centric website? Stonewater has just found out.

On 28 November this year, we launched a brand-new Stonewater.org - a trusted, future-focused website which puts our customers at the heart of what we do. With a whole new look and feel, as well as audience-led navigation that provides the best possible customer journeys and user experience, our site also showcases our brand and values.

And while we’re very proud of what we’ve achieved, we’re also conscious of how we got to the launch point and that work done in the background, in relation to a new content strategy, as well as processes and accountabilities, will help it evolve. At Stonewater, we are committed to making sure that for customers and other stakeholders it will always be easy to come to the website and find what they need.

In this increasingly digital age and with new accessibility standards coming in from October 2023, this brand- new website couldn’t have been better timed. We kept on top of the latest advice regarding user experience, content hierarchy, signposting and design, and factored this in to transform customers’ experience.

In the discovery phase of the project, we spoke to 230 customers and stakeholders, as well as 30 colleagues to discover where they felt our old website could be improved, as well as what they thought we should keep.

What we discovered was that our customers wanted a better experience on our website, with simpler navigation, faster loading times and clearer signposting. This was true for all our research groups, whether they were customers, job seekers, colleagues, investors or partners.

They said:

• Key information was difficult to find when navigating the website.
• They couldn’t find the contact information they needed.
• They couldn’t find the right area for specific questions.
• Content often had a “dead end” with no further calls to action or signposting if the user wanted to learn more or get further support.

So here’s what we did about it:

• We worked on the information architecture to ensure everything is easy to find, needing far fewer clicks than before.
• We implemented colour psychology to connect on an emotional level, helping customers and other stakeholders to feel calm, happy, and energised when dealing with Stonewater.
• We took research on eye-processing speeds into account, creating rounder buttons and space for content to breathe across the website for easier reading and understanding.
• We designed and developed the structure of our new website to be “mobile first” and easy to navigate with one hand.
• We implemented “breadcrumb menus” onto our pages so that customers can see exactly where they are on the website and where they have come from.

Moving forwards, we took the concept of “easy” and worked that into every aspect of our website redesign and redevelopment, as described below.

A key feature of our brand-new website that our customers said they wanted was the ability to find content quicker and easier. In response to this, we created a search bar that takes the user straight to any page on the website that corresponds with the search query. The search parameters set on the platform are broad enough to account for variants but specific enough so that the user knows they have found what they need.

On mobile devices, this feature works particularly well. We are also tracking the most common searches made so that we can create more content around commonly searched for queries. 

We also made our navigation bar “sticky” so that it stays at the top of the screen when you scroll, meaning that you don’t have to keep scrolling back up. Perfect for an easy, seamless experience.

As we found over the course of this immense project, reinventing a website is rarely straightforward and never simple, but with determination, team work, testing and insight, we think we’ve delivered a site that does us and our customers proud. We call it the Power of Easy.

Check out our new site today at Stonewater.org.