We are delighted to announce the recent launch of the new Spitalfields Housing Association website.
Over the years, we have provided reliable support resources to the Spitalfields Housing Association (SHA) to deliver on stakeholder communication and engagement and implemented a range of creative outputs through various channels. Over the last several months, we’ve engaged and worked closely with the SHA team to revamp their old website to reflect the organisation’s current values and mission.
About SHA
Spitalfields Housing Association is the largest Bangladeshi-led housing Association in the UK. The Association was founded in 1979 by members of the Bangladeshi community in response to poor housing conditions in the Spitalfields area.
Understanding the existing website’s challenges
We began the project through an in-depth discovery phase to plan out a delivery road map and conducted a website audit to understand the limitations of the old website; and delivering a future proof strategy that allows the website to increase the capability of an upcoming digital transformation.
An important part of understanding the website’s challenges is via user research. We interviewed a varied sample of tenant participants so we could understand their needs experiences, behaviours and goals in more detail. We also interviewed the internal stakeholders and staff to identify operation pain points where the website could automate some of their processes. This was used as a baseline to measure the current pain points and best solutions of what the end product should be.
Through a combination of discovery exercises, we understood that the informational journey was not targeted to the needs of specific audiences, but was designed to automatically funnel them to customer services with the ‘Contact us’ page receiving the highest traffic, which led to phone calls or in-person enquiries. The old design was also outdated and did not reflect the new brand guidelines that we had recently established in the printed formats. As well as this, the content layout and strategy needed an overhaul and design to be WCAG 2.2 AA accessible.
The final outcome
Built on WordPress CMS and hosted on our cloud-based WPEngine server, the LUV team delivered an easy to maintain, secure, responsive website that works well across all devices, including desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobiles.
The new website design now reflects the new brand guidelines, creating a more unified connection between their online and offline communication platforms. Hand-drawn illustrations are used across the website to emphasis their welcoming and friendly values, whilst also embracing the diversity of their community.
A ‘Tenant’s toolbox’ on the homepage now allows residents to easily navigate to important tools in order to manage their tenancy and home. There is also now more room on the home page for more community updates and important news information information be shown in a cleaner and organised way. News is now separated in it’s own archive and we are currently discussing plans to convert their ‘Inside SHA’ newsletter into a digital format.
A large portion of content which was originally presented in a downloadable PDF format, is now migrated into the CMS creating a more accessible way for users to read content across all devices with more content optimisation to come. We are also working on better integration of third party services, like the tenants portal, to make the user experience more consistent and connected.
Conclusion
We are proud of our long, continued relationship with SHA, and enjoy working with their team to co-design and develop this new website from ideation to completion. We hope that the new and organised content structure not only supports the wider SHA community but also the SHA staff, as it makes the information more accessible and addresses many standard, repetitive enquiries, therefore alleviating the team resources so they can focus their attention on important enquiries and improvements.
Discover more about SHA on their new website.