naturalmohican
By Phillip David Penny
How I prepared the digital department at Helping Hands for growth and scalability.
1317 words (Approximately a 7 minute read)
Upon joining Helping Hands (HH) as the sole employee with any design, UX or development knowledge, it was clear that the digital department required transformation in order to be able to serve the company under its expected growth—a number of concerns and bottlenecks led me to propose a restructuring of the department within just a few months of starting.
During the early stages of growth, using external agencies is a great way of getting features into the hands of your users without the expense of hiring a full team.
HH maximised this by using separate agencies for SEO, UX, design, and development. Being the first “technical” hire the company made—initially to increase the conversion rate—I immediately spotted a breakdown in communications from so many remote and separate parties that was bringing the department to a halt.
My introduction was an 18-month-old project to redesign our most important template which had just completed its twentieth development revision for an upcoming A/B test, yet had no sign-off from SEO—it was clear to me that the department was lacking a process, and someone to manage it.
The work that was created was either fast-tracked by upper management—a common occurrence in immature companies—or of insignificant value due to a lack of direction in research and data.
Part of the change required the creation of work-plans for the external agencies to ensure we would be future-proofed as much as possible for the upcoming changes—we needed them to buy us some time.
With no additional budget available, I set about creating a step-by-step plan to internalise skills, methodically replacing each agency skill with a single staff member to ensure we always covered the end-to-end skill set required, whilst increasing efficiency and productivity.
Let’s look at a theoretical example:
UX agency:
monthly cost: £6,000 (£72,000/year)
monthly hours: 60 (£100/hour)
Employee:
monthly cost: £5,000
monthly hours: 240
Productivity increase: 400%.
Of course with an agency, you get an array of talent at your fingertips with numerous specialists to draw upon—in this case, perhaps a specialist researcher, or a data analyst. However, for a company at the start of its growth, all you really need is one well-rounded specialist to help get the foundations in place for growth.
What follows is my proposed three-step roadmap to transform the digital department of a young business to prepare it for massive growth and scalability. In this case, the timeframe was three years.
The most important thing to get right—provide a solid foundation to build upon.
Over the years as the company grew, the approach was to “bolt-on” additional features to get quick solutions out of the door. This is a great approach for any small business to deliver products to their customers under a very limited budget. However, as a company scales, this approach becomes untenable, and there is a need to start again, almost from the beginning.
Here we are talking about web fundamentals; go ahead and run a performance report on your website and focus on getting a great score across the board—accessibility, performance, best practices etc. Once you reach a high enough score, any updates you want to deploy should be assessed to see how they impact your score and adjusted accordingly. This is your new standard and should not be compromised. Do you have any bugs, “common-sense issues”, or quick-wins available to you? Is there a backlog of items from your SEO department waiting to be implemented? Before you take anything new on, assess the existing priorities and deal with them accordingly.
It is likely you will find inconsistencies and discrepancies in the design language and branding; guidelines may not yet exist. If you have both digital and print departments in the organisation, you could well find that these teams are working in a completely different direction. Create some basic design guidelines, develop these into a single design system, and a design language that the entire company can use.
Do you know who your main user personas are? What are their typical journeys? What are their pain points? How do they feel at each interaction with your company? How do these feelings change over time? How do they use the current version of the website? Find out as much information as you can, it may surprise you and prevent wasted effort.
Read through some of the pages on your website—do you feel like they were all written by the same “being”? Do they follow pyramid journalism? Your pages should be able to be scanned easily, clear, and informative, all at the same time.
The next step is to begin optimising your user journeys.
By now your website should be in a strong position—it may not have all the bells and whistles, but everything that exists is of a high quality and represents your brand well.
Your users don’t solely use your website in their journey—the “touchpoints” are numerous, and they all feed off emotion. You need to consider all the ways in which your user experiences your brand—perhaps you have a mobile app, or a social media presence, or a physical store. Each of these touchpoints should be seamless and consistent with your website.
Modern web technologies allow us to do more than just serve pages faster. By leveraging edge computing and intelligent middleware, we can identify a user’s context—location, device type, or entry source—before the page even renders. This technical foundation is what allows us to start making informed decisions about what to show (and what to hide) in the next phase.
The final phase is about delivering the right content to the right person at the right time.
Using the data gathered in Step 2, we can start to identify users intelligently. By understanding their behaviour and preferences, we can deliver an optimised journey that surfaces relevant content while hiding the extraneous “noise” that often deters or confuses new visitors. This isn’t just about marketing; it’s about reducing cognitive load and helping the user find what they need with minimal friction.
The pinnacle of this approach is the creation of a dedicated account area or portal. This transforms the relationship from a series of anonymous interactions into a continuous, data-rich partnership. By encouraging users to build a profile, we can serve them more directly—providing personalised tools, historical data, and tailored recommendations that make the service indispensable.
In order to achieve the above within an acceptable time frame, it was clear we needed to transition away from the agencies. This would have to be done sequentially to minimise risk and prove itself at each step.
Due to my wide range of skills in all areas, the first step was to hire the role that was least expensive, and also my strongest area—design and UX. This would allow me to run the remaining areas of digital whilst providing mentorship to my new hire.
Prior to ending the contract with the design agency, I put them on a path of 100% research to ensure we had enough data to plan out all the tests we would need to focus on over the coming years. They delivered a user journey map, along with our key personas and customer struggles.
The role of the new hire would be the following:
With my new UX hire in place, I would be able to focus on the development of the website, preparing the company to move away from the digital agency in the coming 12 months.