Redesigning the Human Agency brand, website and talent management system
Problem
The Human Agency’s website and brand had become outdated and no longer reflected the range and quality of their services. Their website lacked the functionality they required to run their business efficiently and had become a barrier to attracting new talent and clients.
Project goals
Establish The Human Agency as an energetic leading brand.
Simplify and streamline internal business processes.
Create an industry leading talent directory website.
- Attract quality new talent and clients to the business.
Approach
The large challenge going into this project was scope. The new website needed to manage marketing, recruitment, talent directories and extensive talent management tools. With that in mind, I approached the project much like a startup; creating a loose framework for the overall vision then defining a narrow MVP to be rolled out and tested before building wider functionality.
Information architecture: Wire-framing played an important role in determining how the various user groups, both from outside and inside the business, would navigate and utilise the website together. It also enabled me to plan how future functionality could integrate and therefore avoid potential conflicts as the site expanded.
Marketing: Based on user research and google keyword analysis I designed and wrote various keyword focused landing pages to attract and convert new talent and clients.
Talent directories: Five seperate talent directories were needed. Each directory required unique data to be collected, displayed and available to search, with members often having a profile in multiple directories. How the data was collected, presented and searched also varied greatly depending on a users role.
Talent submissions: When a talent agent receives a new casting call, they have a very short amount of time to make a ‘submission’ to the casting director. These submissions are sent via email and can include multiple roles and wide variety of information. I designed and built a bespoke submission workflow so admins could quickly and easily create, edit and send submissions.
Learnings
The technical needs of this project presented a big challenge. The client required the flexibly and scalability of a brochure website with the extensive bespoke functionality of a SAAS product. All within one cost effective and easy to manage platform.
After a lot of investigation I decided to leverage an off-the-shelf CMS and developer friendly plugins to provide the basis of the brochure site and directories. I then utilised an off-shore developer to customise the existing plugins and build the additional bespoke functionality.
This has proved to be a very cost effective approach and has meant that many changes or additional features can be easily added, while more extensive functionality can also be integrated seamlessly.
