"We’re delighted with the redesign of the site, Pixelgroup have done a great job in answering our brief. They managed to design in a very considered manner, incorporating the targeted ad units which are our primary revenue sources, without making the ads themselves intrusive or cluttered. Our advertisers are really keen to see how well the new site performs for them. Great work guys."
Catherine Jacklin
Head of Marketing
Financial Times Recruitment Solutions
exec-appointments.com is a global executive job board, part of Financial Times Recruitment Solutions (FT) where the finest global talent meets the world's best jobs. To improve their user experience and bring the brand in line with the FT; their project director sought us out after encountering the Abel&Cole website. After an engaging meeting they felt we were the best equipped to create an outstanding usable website as well as get measurable results that delivered on their promise of being a leader in the executive job market.
We considered each component of our methodology; from user research to user testing, design in terms of usability and creativity. Gathering all the requirements, designing the information architecture and building the HTML ready for their tech team. It was very important that we listened to their jobseekers and understood exec-appointments.com’s business before we began.
A look and feel was created that was premium, strong & trustworthy, without having the obvious FT pink route. It was crucial that we carved out a new brand for exec-appointments.com in their own right, while still giving a knowing nod to it’s legacy with the FT.
Our approach was fully user-centred; putting the user at the heart of our research and conducting testing throughout the design process to make sure the website was intuitive as well as beautiful. We ensured the project requirements, including technical, functional and individual stakeholder concerns, were at the forefront of the process. We fully understood the KPIs - to increase conversion IE more ads posted, increase job applications, leverage the FT’s brand values and most importantly sustain their level of SEO which was already very good.
With these in place we were able to effectively measure our progress throughout the redesign. Working closely with the FT technical team we made the back-end integration easy and efficient to implement, saving time and mitigating delivery risk. The process we went through embraced best-practice and web standards throughout. The internal launch was a great success and the revamped exec-appointments.com has now gone live.
