13 / 10 / 2017

Alliance Manchester Business School’s website gets personal

Author

Rebecca Holden

Category

News

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Alliance Manchester Business School (AMBS) launches a new digital platform with user personalisation, led by Bolton-based creative and digital agency, Absolute.

After a successful pitch against several other creative agencies, Absolute was chosen to lead the creative user interface and front end development, in partnership with TerminalFour, the specialist content management system for the education sector.

Established in 1965 as one of the first business schools in the UK, AMBS now has a truly global reach with centres all around the world, including Dubai, Hong Kong, Sao Paolo, Shanghai and Singapore. 

The site is used by a global audience including students, lecturers and businesses, with vast amounts of content relevant to each of those audiences; therefore university websites can inherently be difficult to navigate. To overcome this, Absolute focused on creating a preference based personalised user experience. The ‘user content hub’ allows visitors to quickly select why they are visiting the site to create a user journey of news, updates, information, videos and social media posts that are meaningful and relevant to them. These preferences are then used intuitively across the site, serving related information in key areas of the journey and omitting irrelevant information.

Absolute designed and constructed wireframes, unique page layouts using HTML mark-ups and produced a set of digital style guides to use in conjunction with front-end templates, for T4 and AMBS’ internal digital team to build.

Chris Hodgen, MD of Absolute comments: “At Absolute we’ve completed several website projects for a number of leading higher educational institutes so we understand the challenges they face. One of the main issues is that university websites have to cater for so many different personas that all have different wants and needs. By designing and building a digital platform that is fully responsive and offers a personalised experience for each user, we can make sure users can access the information they need quickly, without getting lost in a sea of irrelevant content.”

Absolute has also completed website projects for University of Manchester, Queen’s University Belfast, University of Glasgow, University of Bradford and University of Stirling.