A user friendly website that efficiently communicates to Housing associations.

The brief

The Housing Forum’s current web solution had numerous flaws. It lacked personality, important content was hard to find and posts didn’t have any categorisation. These issues caused an increase in bounce rate and membership rates to decline. The goal was to improve the user experience and present content in a way that efficiently communicates to the Housing Forums members.

The result

The first step we carried out was speaking to The Housing Forum existing members to find out what will encourage them to visit the website and what will motivate them to return.

We found that they’d like to see three main improvements, simplified page layout to easier digest content, learn something new upon every visit and be prompted to return. Such findings led to us to design and build a website in which instantly tells the user what’s new, a simple wayfinding module to present key areas of the website and newsletter signup forms for users to receive new content every week.

The other biggest challenge was structuring The Housing Forum posts, mainly the Insights & Reports due to these posts having many disciplines. This required extensive planning and testing before we were satisfied that users wouldn’t be left feeling confused and frustrated.

Since the launch of the new website, The Housing Forum has seen steady growth in membership signups and returning visitors.

housingforum.org.uk