M&S

A number of complex initiatives, such as a fully transparent and accessible supplier map were produced to help the corporate brand of M&S. In depth discovery workshops helped shape a new strategy that brought more to the corporate site in telling the M&S story. Thorough user experience and testing were performed to ensure a highly engaging result - as well as enabling easy ongoing updates to be performed. The corporate site was redesigned and brought up to date to produce a much more engaging brand and values experience.

M&S invests a great deal in many important issues the world faces today, so the corporate site needed to reflect this objective, as well as provide the tools for users to better understand the brand and its values. This pushed the website away from the unemotional and numbers based typical corporate site - into more of an informative, engaging story telling site based around the Plan A initiative and projects. This was also combined with a new accessible interactive M&S supplier map to intuitively understand their business structure and values.

One of the initiatives we helped design and develop to help M&S be more transparent was the M&S supplier map. The fully interactive map allows the user to understand the M&S factories, raw material suppliers and community projects invested in. Complex data is made simple via initial thorough wireframe and user experience sketching and testing, an intuitive interface – making it easy to find supplier types and information, as well as providing global or selected data in simple graphical stats and infographics.

The aim was to really consider a corporate website and the role it plays today. We used workshops, analytics and a detailed discovery analysis of current trends and user behaviours, to create an evolution plan for the website and content. Our discovery was that recent increases of consumer traffic, and not just stakeholders, represented an excellent opportunity to create an engaging online brand experience, better content storytelling, and more focus on M&S values and initiatives.

Storytelling matters, and the web allows us to be immersed in content in much more engaging ways, such as crafted editorial articles, rich media, and interaction. Increased reader goals to understand more about the M&S brand and initiatives, meant new designs that made content easy to find and engage with. Using research on online user behaviours, we crafted considered website modules that help a user walk through a community project, interact with easily digestible interviews, videos and facts. This created content that wants to be experienced and shared.

Studies regarding online reader behaviours have highlighted issues with people reading a lot of content on screen. Due to some content on a corporate site being fairly detailed, we devised a static secondary ‘chapter’ navigation (utilised in Webooks), to help the reader understand if the content is relevant, and skip to various chapters with ease. Short paragraphs were recommended as well as implementing key word titles to allow for viewer page scanning, and varied content such as quotes and graphics to help engagement.

‘Spark Something Good’ was a new initiative from M&S which aims to get their staff, stores and customers involved to make a real difference. We created fully responsive designs, which enabled users to find out which events were available within their own M&S community (via a user store search and an activity page), as well as a fully interactive main event page showcasing all of the opportunities to get involved, and sign up information and event images and video.