The new website for Cass and Claredale
Cass and Claredale are a specialist housing association and charity focusing upon providing good value accomodation to university students in London.
The requirements
To fill the rooms for both term-time and holidays
Cass and Claredale are unusual in London Halls of Residences by not charging for summer vacations. They rent out both halls to different groups of summer residents; short stay at Cass and longer term at Claredale.
The website therefore has to be able to simultaneously promote the same rooms at different buildings to different audiences at different times of the year.
Confused? That's where we came in. Our job was to guide site vsitors as soon as they landed on the site to the right part of the site for them.
What we did...
Defining the objectives
We started by asking, fundamentally, who did the client want to use their site and why? By focusing on the user throughout the project, we enabled the client to get what they needed from the site. This came down to getting full occupancy from students in the term-time and from visitors in the summer. Simple.
Examining the user needs
We helped define what both students and visitors wanted, how imagery supported their choices and how to intuitively direct them to the information they wanted and leave the site happy.
Engaging the client
From the discovery phase to the finish we engaged with the client, drawing up a good brief first, outlining the wireframes to establish the user-journey, and only then moving into the design phase. We checked the outcome against the brief and tested the design with some users.