MillboardRevolutionising Millboard's global digital presence

So, our challenge was to reinvigorate the brand online, plus replatform and launch a new global website. Whilst the end-to-end process took one year to the day, the platform was developed in a remarkably short time frame of just 4 months (a feat nearly unheard of for a complicated enterprise build like this). The goal was to differentiate Millboard from its competitors, spearhead business growth while streamlining routine product deployment across the globe.

Ultimately, we set out to create a new global website for Millboard, designed to help customers make their dream outdoor space a reality. Investing in your outdoor space is more than it may seem. This is an inspirational process with lots of decisions to make across a wide range of outdoor products. Customers need support in planning and execution of their visions, without the headache!

A crucial key performance indicator, and revenue generator, for Millboard was to encourage customers to order a sample of their flagship products. This not only captures leads but also allows customers to experience the quality of Millboard's premium products. To do this, we would need to create new customer journeys, and an improved sample order mechanism.

As a starting point, our team took a user-centric approach by establishing five key customer personas for the web experience that we determined to be imperative for business success. These were homeowners, commercial end-users, architects, installers, and distributors. Understanding the different needs of these personas allowed us to tailor the website experience to effectively engage traffic and capture leads.

We conducted various discovery workshops with stakeholders and interviewed customers from each persona group to gather detailed business and consumer insights. Not only do we need to cater for the users of the site, but core business challenges and needs are identified and resolved through the process. Prior to taking the designs into build, we conducted user testing on the website design templates and core user journeys to ensure a seamless user experience.

The Strategy team played a key role in the discovery and definition of the project's outputs. They were instrumental in establishing horizons and features, and refining our audience personas — providing a comprehensive plan for the initial MVP release. Then it fell to the UX team to map the customer journeys, conduct user interviews and user testing, build out the information architecture, and redefine the site’s navigation. Finally this would come to design to realise the new website page templates along with an atomised component library.

In collaboration with Girl&Bear from VCCP, the fundamental Millboard brand world was evolved across other channels and a light brand refresh was applied to premiumise the brand on the next stage of its journey. This included refined branding and communications guidelines that updated the visual representation of the Millboard brand across all touchpoints — both digital and non-digital.

After an extensive Definition phase, to deliver the project in a streamlined fashion, we implemented an Agile delivery method with 2-week sprint cycles. This allowed us to work efficiently and make continuous improvements throughout the design and development process.

Once the features, epics and horizons were defined during the strategy phase, our specialist teams created three regional websites using Acquia, a market-leading Digital Experience Platform (DXP). The DXP incorporated:

• Acquia Cloud Platform, an Enterprise Content Management System (CMS) built on Drupal for easy content updates and implementation of translations for each region.

• A Product Information Management (PIM) system to centralise product data

• A Digital Asset Management (DAM) system to centralise all digital assets

• Acquia Edge, a Content Delivery Network (CDN) for enhanced speed and security

These all combined to support better centralised control and a data-driven approach to ensure higher levels of performance and security across the website. This also now provides the brand team with huge efficiency when it comes to maintenance and upkeep of product content across international markets.

The fully tested UX journeys have been optimised to enable simpler conversion methods capable of generating better qualified leads. Additionally, we implemented an ecommerce journey for sample requests, with 'shoppable' product catalogue pages, and made various UX and visual design improvements such as enhancing content hierarchy and discoverability within a global website that truly elevates the Millboard brand head and shoulders above its peers.