Skills Centre - industrial website design
Building the right website for the job using UX excellency.
Starting with a thorough UX discovery and research, we built a high-performing website design for a non-profit trade and labour association.
High performing website for career readiness service
Skills Centre is an employment and career services agency operating out of British Columbia’s rugged West Kootenay region. As the largest provider of employment services in the region, thousands of people rely on Skills Centre services to upgrade job skills, find work, and access community resources. Skills Centre engaged with BlackBean in 2021 to rebuild their website in order to better serve their organizational objectives.
Challenge
The previous Skills Centre website presented a unique UI/UX challenge. The website received tons of organic search traffic and high engagement from its many visitors, but not the right kind of engagement. Users arrived on the popular regional job board, leaving before exploring Skills Centre’s training and employment services. These services are Skills Centre’s core mandate, but remained underutilized by its prospective clients.
Solution
Our solution was to ‘go with the flow’. Skills Centre successfully attracts dozens of viewers per day to its website, largely through its presence in Google for search terms like ‘kootenay job board’ and ‘jobs near Trail BC’. Instead of trying to deflect users from the path of least resistance, we leaned into the job board. We developed a tagging system to highlight relevant Skills Centre services for each job. Is the user looking at a job that requires first aid certification? They’ll see a call-to-action to register for first aid training through Skills Centre.
The Skills Centre job board was rebuilt to distribute traffic to relevant services. This technique supports Skills Centre’s strengths in terms of user acquisition. The goal was to align with the wants and needs of their audience, adding value instead of imposing a different experience.
Results
Before rebuilding the website, over 85% of website traffic visited the job board and went no further. On the new website, 43% of users engage with content other than the job board on their visit. Content engagement improved substantially. Users spend an average of over three minutes on-page on the new website, compared to just 1:29 on the previous version. Average search position and overall search volume also increased due to improved website quality and SEO. As percentage of traffic share, search traffic has increased from 45% to 60% since launching the new website.
Too many websites get built as though they’re works of art. A website is an information tool. UI/UX is the science of making that information accessible and enjoyable to navigate for your target audience. We can help you build a high-performing marketing website using the science of great user interface design.
UI/UX-First Website Design
“BlackBean demonstrated an understanding of who we are and what we are trying to achieve and how our website is a tool to do that. They showed us information we didn’t know, suggested things to include and to remove from the new site, and made it very user friendly for us working on the back end as well as for our clients using the new site. ” D. Walls, Communications Manager
