naturalmohican
By Phillip David Penny
Pivotal in the digital transformation and growth of the company to become industry leaders.
As the UX Manager, I was the first internal hire at Helping Hands (HH) with design & development knowledge—and was tasked with managing three external agencies for SEO, UX, and Development, and increasing the conversion rate (CR) on the website. It became immediately apparent to me we needed to internalise resources in order to be able to grow and scale in line with the company ambitions and stay within the limited budget.
Within my first month, I built and released an employee recognition platform using a single webform and Google Sheets to act as a database.
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Seeing my co-workers in the pay-per-click (PPC) team struggle with landing page generation software, I created a standalone website to be used as a PPC microsite to give us full control over display and technology. Not only did this increase conversion rate by 35% (worth over three million pounds in revenue), but it also acted as the foundation for an A/B testing site and helped launch the company into a rebrand.
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It was at this point I realised we needed to make big changes to be successful, so I created a three-year roadmap to help us scale the department and allow us to grow in line with the business needs.
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Working with limited financial resources, I took the decision to hire a UX/UI designer to mentor, allowing me to focus on the development side and ease the bottleneck in production.
We fully modernised the company’s online branding and created a design system in Figma. This was handled carefully to allow the UX designer to maintain ownership whilst still providing mentoring and strategic advice.
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The next project was to fully internalise development to remove the bottleneck caused by an underfunded external agency. I hired a junior front-end developer to mentor and hand over the lower-skilled work as I provided training. This enabled me to free up time to focus on the next strategic steps for the department—transitioning over to a Git-based VCS from the current implementation of SVN, allowing us to truly scale. I also hired a talented back-end developer to assist in implementing DevOps to get us all working smarter, faster, and more efficiently.