Helping a trade association understand their current website member experience

The Food and Drink Federation (FDF) is the membership organisation that represents and advises the largest manufacturing sector in the UK. Their website is a critical resource providing business guidance, industry insights and committee documents to support their members.

Ahead of a broader website refresh, we undertook a programme of user research to uncover how well the existing site served its members. While the FDF had robust quantitative data about the website, they were keen to get qualitative insight into why members behaved the way they did and what experience gaps existed.

Working closely with FDF stakeholders, we defined clear research objectives and identified a diverse set of member types to include in our study. This ensured we captured a broad and representative understanding of the user experience from members of SME and large businesses.

We conducted 15 remote, semi-structured interviews combined with usability testing sessions focused on the current website experience. Using Dovetail to transcribe and analyse the sessions, we efficiently extracted actionable insights and ensured a high level of accuracy in our reporting.

With consent from our research participants, we were able to create a highlight video reel for key FDF stakeholders to see and hear first-hand from members how they use and experience their current membership website. Our approach is to bring stakeholders much closer to their customers’ needs and frustrations, rather than just reading a report of our research findings.  

In collaboration with FDF we were then able to develop a prioritised roadmap of improvements based on changes that would add the biggest impact to the member experience based on the evidence from our research findings. We also helped FDF consider a phased delivery in terms of rolling out improvements in keeping with our approach to continuous improvement.

Working in partnership with the FDF, we developed a prioritised roadmap focused on the changes that would deliver the greatest impact to the member experience. The roadmap was structured in three phases – quick wins, mid-term enhancements and longer term strategic UX improvements – to support delivery across multiple sprints as part of their wider website transformation programme.