The brief

 BIMA is the British Interactive Media Association, operating as a not-for-profit industry body representing the digital industry in the UK. Formed in 1985, BIMAis a membership organisation primarily made up of digital agencies with a membership extending to several thousand individual digital professionals. 

It had been identified that the website (built using Sitecore) was causing issues from a backend perspective for BIMA, but also from a user experience perspective. It was particularly difficult to navigate and find key resources. The application to become a member was also fraught with difficulty and BIMA needed the website to be easy to use to attract new members and provide an intuitive platform for networking and promoting their own businesses.

Our approach 

With the old BIMA website having various organisational problems to contend with it took a number of site map iterations to work through before we progressed to working out the user journey and experience in Sketch. Sketch is a very useful tool we use on certain projects that allows us to map out an interactive skeleton of the website in wireframes.

We had two key considerations at this point:

Firstly, How a potential new members journey might play out, learning about the membership options then proceeding to application.

Using a tabbed question and answer style approach, we were able to streamline this into one page and shorten the application process.

Secondly, we required easy to administer membership profile pages for both companies and employees or individual members.

We created 55 pages as a clickable prototype and tested this with stakeholders, to validate the optimal member journey, before proceeding to design. 

The results

Despite the Covid-10 pandemic, so far so good. The website has seen a 25% increase in use but importantly BIMA are seeing more page engagement and a much lower bounce rate.

Rachel Johnson, Marketing Director at BIMA, said, “The team at Think Design were fundamental to this project. They guided us throughout the design process, at all stages providing us with creative concepts on time. It was a difficult project, which grew substantially as we progressed. The team managed the changes brilliantly. I had total trust in the team and they delivered. I would recommend Think Design for any web project but particularly for a membership organisation that has many stakeholders.”