Henley Business School
Henley was the first business school established in the UK, with the ambition to empower individuals to become great professionals and outstanding business leaders. 75 years down the line, they remain one of the oldest and most respected schools in Europe.
“We have worked with Kind over a number of projects recently, and have found them to be professional, engaging and efficient.”
A process built on user research
Henley has a varied audience both in the UK and Internationally and all have differing needs and motivations for using the Henley website. We ran a user-centred process throughout the project to ensure that design decisions and assumptions were validated with real members of Henley’s target audience.
This included checking that the structure of the website made sense and that it was straightforward to navigate to a desired location, as well as moderated testing of the user experience of the various components that made up the website.
Delivery
Search as a service
Throughout the Henley website there would be a need to deliver feeds of relevant content: courses, news articles and impact case studies for instance.
We used Algolia to index the content of the Henley website and deliver an search function which allowed users to instantaneously filter content and find the most suitable result for them.
Creating a Design System
Rather than delivering a set of mocked up page ‘templates’, we worked with Henley to deliver a Design System that would act as a foundation for everything they deliver online.
We started by setting design principles and rules that should be considered and adhered to at all times.
These principles were then used during our UX and Design phases to create a set of components and templates that would be used to deliver the Henley website.
Post-launch Design System will continue to be updated and act as a living documentation of Henley’s digital design approach.
Content governance
With hundreds of content editors, it was important that Henley had a robust user management framework for their website. We used Craft CMS’s out-of-the-box user permissions feature to devise a number of user roles, each with different permissions based on sections and specific pages they could edit, publish or create content for.
Additionally, to ensure content was suitable for publishing and well maintained, we created a custom content governance workflow, including the requirement to describe the need for any new pages when creating them and automated reporting of stale content to the responsible user.
Two sites, one CMS
The ICMA Centre is Henley’s financial education facility and, due to its reputation, it made sense to continue to maintain a separate web presence.
However, the administrative overhead of maintaining two websites is often a headache. Using Craft CMS’s multi-site feature, we allowed Henley to manage the content of both websites within the same CMS, even sharing templates and content between them.
This not only made editing easier, particularly for users with responsibilities on both websites, but also meant that Henley only have to pay one CMS license fee.
See the finished product at: henley.ac.uk
