Service and project type

Technology | Digital experience | Search experience optimisation

Relationship

Kainos plc is a FTSE250 technology consulting firm, founded in 1986 as a joint venture between Queen’s University Belfast and the Japanese global IT services company Fujitsu. They currently employ over 2000 people across Europe and North America.

Kainos asked us to reimagine their digital experience to bring it up to date and in line with their new ‘One Kainos’ strategy. They wanted to the site to get more traffic and improve conversion rates on their site to help with lead generation. 

This was a challenge that required a search experience optimisation approach.

Problem

Kainos operates in two primary segments:

1. Digital Services: Building digital products and services for public sector and enterprise clients.
2. Workday Practice: Providing support to Workday customers globally, encompassing implementation, optimisation, and testing services.

Despite significant growth and evolution in recent years, Kainos’ digital experience had not kept pace. They had separate websites, each offering radically different experiences. The challenge was to unify their online presence under the new strategy and ensure the new site could generate leads, integrated with their marketing automation software.

Kainos also aimed to ensure that their design system was responsive across various devices, including mobile and tablet.

The Kainos design system was created to work across multiple devices including mobile and tablet.

Solution

The project unfolded in distinct phases:

1. Discovery and research: We conducted interviews with internal stakeholders and customers to gain insights into different facets of the business, value propositions, customer types, and their journeys throughout the sales cycle and beyond.
2. User experience design: Defining the information architecture, structure, and user journeys across the site. The goal was to unify content where possible while recognizing the need to keep certain sections separate for easier navigation. This included a new global Insights section with efficient filtering controls to help different customer types discover relevant content easily.
3. User interface design: We created a design system emphasizing solid accessibility principles, aiming for an ‘AA’ grade accessible website based on the WCAG 2.1 guidelines. The design system revolved around reusable modules, ensuring future flexibility and visual consistency.
4. Development and deployment: Leveraging the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (formerly Episerver), we integrated key components such as Marketo for marketing campaigns and Workday for careers.
5. Extensive SEO work to ensure that no visibility was lost during the migration and launch and to put the site in the best possible position to begin attracting higher volumes of high quality traffic. 

Results

The new site went live in May 2021, with an extensive SEO migration involving over 25,000 individual pages transferred from the three legacy sites to the new consolidated Kainos website.

Immediate post-launch activities included usability testing to inform future developments and SEO monitoring to safeguard search equity during the transition period.

To meet the accessibility standards of WCAG 2.1. AA, we created a new design system for Kainos including digital specific colours and typography for use across the web.

Following launch:

•  SEO performance saw a x2.5 increase in search traffic, content engagement rates increased
• Form conversion rates increased from 1% to 3%.