The challenge

Michael Cooper asked Johnston North to create a website to show off his stunning aerial photography.

The solution

Our goal was simple – display Michael’s photographs in best light possible.

To achieve this we created a design that presents the photographs fullscreen regardless of the visitors screen size.

Like the photographs, we believe the result speaks for itself.

The challenge

Matt Stocker asked us to help him develop a professional online presence with the flexibility to grow and adapt with his business.

The solution

With a strong understanding of design Matt created the look-and-feel himself. Johnston North were on hand to provide technical support and usability advice during this initial phase.

With the design complete we turned it into code and built Matt’s website using the popular WordPress blogging tool. WordPress was the perfect fit for Matt allowing him extensive control over his site and access to a wide range of third party plugins.

This flexible platform has allowed Matt’s website to keep a pace with his growing business.

Glowing praise

Artwiculate is an experiment in creating a passionate online community. It was officially launched on the 21st September 2009 within two weeks had attracted more than 4,000 followers on Twitter.

It has received glowing praise from its users and has been featured on a number of major blogs including LifeHacker, Mashable and Swiss Miss.

Passionate community

In a little over a month it has received almost 30,000 visits and has been adopted by a passionate community with 300 to 500 people playing the game each day.

Artwiculate’s success has been meteoric but not accidental. It is the result of an uncompromising commitment to user experience and a considered, strategic plan for user engagement devised by Johnston North and Atto.

Courting influential players

Core to our strategy was to court influential users by offering them early, privileged access to Artwiculate. In the run up to the official launch we initially invited just 9 people to try out Artwiculate.

We then expanded our early access programme to a wider circle of about 50.

By cultivating relationships with these users we created a supportive and influential user-base who ensured Artwiculate had a strong, widely publicised launch.

Listening to our users

Throughout the pre-launch and since 21st September we have listened carefully to our users, treated them with respect and responded to their queries promptly.

We believe this focus on our users will ensure the long-term success of Artwiculate.

The challenge

Traditional report writing for teachers involves juggling dozens of Word documents, endless copying and pasting and a lot of hard work. It’s time-consuming, painful and error-prone.

Our challenge was to sensitively and sensibly apply cutting edge web technology to remove the problems and bottlenecks in the process.

The solution

Throughout the process we worked closely with local teachers to fully understand the workflow and the issues with it. We also talked to parents about what they wanted from their child’s report.

We then worked through each of the problem areas to create a sophisticated and intuitive tool full of clever little nuances to make report writing quick and easy. Some of the key features include built in spell-checking, PDF generation and the ability to import student data from existing management systems.

You can find out more about ReportBox by visiting the website at: http://www.reportbox.com

Two recent projects have included a refresh of their website and a new contact relationship management tool.

Website

CMS Ireland asked Johnston North to redevelop their website to enhance, extend and support the communication amongst its growing global network of supporters, Mission Partners and churches.

Traditionally all the communication within the network was routed and managed through two Ireland based offices – one in Belfast and one in Dublin. In order to support a growing network our solution was to custom build a website that would decentralise the communication between supporters, partners, churches and the head office.

Blog-based

To achieve this we built a blog-based website that provided CMS Ireland and each mission partner with their own blog. Each blog acted as a micro-site and we built a system which aggregated them all together for the main CMS Ireland website.

Content management

The system was driven by a content management system that gave CMS Ireland administrators full control over all the blogs and content on the website.

We also built a stripped down version of the content management system for mission partners that provided quick and easy access to key functions. This was particularly important as many mission partners were dotted across Africa and Asia and had slow, temperamental internet access.

The website has changed the way CMS Ireland’s network communicates and has improved the quality and quantity of that communication as the network has expanded.

Contact Relationship Management

CMS Ireland manages a global network of supporters, Mission Partners and churches. Critical to the success of this is their contact relationship management (CRM) which sits at the heart of the organisation. The CRM tool also handles all of CMS Ireland’s donations.

CMS Ireland commissioned Johnston North to develop a replacement to their existing, antiquated CRM tool.

Working in close partnership with CMS Ireland we first ran a detailed project to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the current system and the organisation’s needs for the replacement.

The new tool was created as an online application allowing all staff to access contact information – wherever in the world they are.

Once completed, we ran a number of training sessions with CMS Ireland staff to help them transition to the new system.

The CRM tool has dramatically improved the ease and speed at which all staff can access contact and donation information within CMS Ireland.

The challenge

Having secured seed funding, Ed approached Johnston North to design, build and launch an online platform for musical comedy in the UK.

The solution

Our work on this project is best described by Ed himself,

“Right from the outset Johnston North were full of brilliant ideas on how to translate my creative brief into action.

I was looking to set up a website that could offer musical comedians a dedicated platform for musical comedy and also host a musical comedy competition (The Musical Comedy Awards) to discover, expose and promote the UK’s highly talented, but rather neglected emerging musical comedy community.

Not only did they present me with a great deal of ideas on how best to leverage new developments in web-design and social networking functionality, but crucially, they also gave me expert advice on how best to use this technology and shape the website to meet both the cultural and commercial objectives of my business.

This advice was also always rooted in the idea that the website should be focussed on the needs of my customers and offer them a fantastic, uncomplicated user experience.

I’m really grateful to Johnston North for their patience, flexibility and fantastic customer service – I’ve now got a great looking website that has attracted some fantastic talent in the first two weeks since launch, and the usability and flair of the site has played a massive role in that.”

Ed Chappel

The challenge

Motor Dealer Software contacted Johnston North to build an online business management tool for independent dealers.

The solution

Working closely together with Motor Dealer Software we designed, built and launched a comprehensive yet easy to use application that has received wide praise.

The website is still under wraps at the moment and will be launching later this year.

The challenge

jobs.ac.uk commissioned Johnston North to conduct a user experience study for 50 of their university clients.

The study

The objective of the report was to help Higher Education Institutions improve the quality of their online recruitment websites by focusing on the user experience.

User experience is a visitor’s journey to and through the website. The report covered three key areas: accessibility, credibility and usability.

1. Accessibility addresses the importance of ensuring that everyone, particularly disabled visitors, can navigate, understand and interact with the website.
2. Credibility focuses on whether visitors believe and trust the website enough to act on it.
3. Usability looks at whether visitors can successfully and efficiently complete their goals and tasks using the website.

Each area was assessed through ten to twelve criteria in a ‘mystery shopping’ style test. The report covered how each criteria was tested, what common problems were found and how to go about implementing best practice.

In total, 50 UK higher education institutions were tested in the study.

The study identified five key areas of user experience related to online recruitment – links, names, consistency, standards and help.

The challenge

Juicy Info help organisations get their hands on useful, insightful and relevant information fast. Our challenge was to create a website that would do the same for potential clients browsing Juicy’s website.

The solution

Working alongside Juicy Info’s designer we built a website with a clear focus on the visitor. We structured it to make it easy for visitors to find key information about the Juicy, including – who they are, what they have done in the past and what they can do to help organisations.

Behind the scenes a content management system allows Juicy to update the website and post new articles to their blog.

The challenge

Sawyers challenged Johnston North to come up with an attractive, easy to use website that would appeal to a diverse mix of visitors.

The solution

With such a wide range of potential visitors it was vital that everyone involved with the project clearly understood who we were trying to reach. From the very start we worked closely with Sawyers Church to identify these key audiences.

We then designed an information architecture that supported a large amount of content but would still allow each audience to quickly navigate to what they were looking for.

An attractive design was layered on top and we implemented a content management system behind the scenes to allow all members of staff to contribute to the website.

We ran two training sessions with Sawyers Church. The first, took everyone through the key features and functionality of the website. The second session was an in-depth look, targeted just at the main website administrators.