The Army wanted to recruit for the Territorial Army and Regular army using a single website and identity under a new “One Army” brand. Part of this re-organisation involved a redesign of the old Army Jobs website. The Army used their incumbent agency at the time – Publicis – to undertake this work.
In order to understand user needs in more detail we engaged with the online chat team and the telephone call centre (the primary “customer” facing staff) to get an insight into the different types of people they dealt with and the questions they tended to get asked. From this initial research we created a number of Persona for which the site was to be designed.
An information architecture was created for the new site that would signpost relevant content for Reserves and Regulars at appropriate points but that would otherwise deliver the same experience to both types of visitors. An important element of the new site was a re-vamped job search process based around a series of re-designed job cards. The XML was defined for these cards so that the same content could be pushed both online and to print publications handled by Haymarket.
Other important elements were:
The site won a BIMA award in the year it was launched (2007). However the site is no longer live as the army jobs site was recently merged with the main army site.
I'm a User Experience Designer and Digital Strategist with a range of experience from large systems integration projects to brand experience sites.
