Wilson Fletcher | Strategic digital design

Every single day, millions of people around the world use inspiring digital services created by WilsonFletcher.

From our studios in London and Sydney we offer a unique integrated approach to user insight, service strategy and experience design.

Working closely with forward thinking clients, we inspire change, invent concepts, and realise ideas that reach millions of people every day.

Our core disciplines

User insight.

We generate potent end user, marketplace and organisational insights using innovative research and analysis techniques.

Our insight work provides critical fuel for strategy and design programmes, identifying everything from large-scale trends and opportunities to fine-grained interface and user behaviour issues.

Our focus is applicable insight: research outcomes that we can use to generate new concepts, inform meaningful solutions and underpin decision-making.

Our insight work is often used to:

Provide critical insight for a new service strategy.
Test service interfaces on their target customers.
Identify key user needs to drive design decisions.
Co-create and explore service propositions.

“Their working methods allowed us to create a site where readers and users played an active and essential role in shaping the site from its design, to its functionality, content and architecture.” News International

Methods include:

Group, 1:1, remote / value mapping, interface usability testing, service co-creation, eye tracking, user profiling, market profiling.

Service strategy.

We think strategically about everything. Strategy can shape a new vision or articulate an existing one, but it always defines direction.

Our strategy work uses practical techniques to identify opportunities, generate the right ideas to capitalise on them and shape practical, achievable approaches to delivery.

We usually conduct strategy programmes with senior teams to help embed digital thinking at a high level, instil service clarity and unite teams enthusiastically behind common goals.

Typical strategy projects include:

Holistic digital service strategy.
Content access models and paid content strategies.
New product development - rapid feasibility studies.
Digital transformation and change programmes.

“We scoured the world for a partner on a major project at ninemsn, found WilsonFletcher and they delivered.” ninemsn

Methods include:

Service modelling, visioning, component mapping, proposition development

Experience design.

Turning great ideas into an outstanding end-user service experience – solving the design problem – is the core of our work.

Our experience design work spans architecture, brand language, interaction behaviour and every other aspect of the presentation layer. Our team has enormous experience in cutting-edge UI and service experience design.

We deliver everything from revolutionary high-concept interface prototypes to complete service designs, detailed to the last pixel, across services as diverse as single page layouts and large-scale complex interactive products.

Some example applications

Large-scale web service planning and design.
Creating data-rich applications and service interfaces.
Multi-platform, multi-device interfaces.
Subscription services and tiered access digital environments.

“Wilson Fletcher helped The Sunday Times to create a service where the experience of browsing and selecting is as pleasurable as the consumption of the content itself” The Sunday Times

Methods include:

Service architecture, UI design, brand language creation, rapid prototyping, conceptualisation

What we deliver.

Our clients ask us to help them with some of the most pressing digital challenges faced by today's organisations. These are some of the current hot topics...

Rapid service visioning.

Deliver critical services to market faster.

Time to market can be the difference between success and failure for many digital services, but speed without quality is worthless in today's highly adaptive, competitive markets.

That’s where rapid service visioning comes in: turning an idea or opportunity into a viable service concept in the minimum time possible, to the highest standards.

Using intensive techniques, even a radically new service can be envisioned quickly and powerfully.

Fully informed by user and market insight and underpinned by broad strategic thinking, rapid service visioning is a revolutionary way to bring services to life.

It's also a fantastic technique for rapidly determining feasibility or selling in a bold new idea.

We blend insight, strategy and design in unique ways to radically speed up service concepting and reduce time to market.

Digital service strategy.

Build future services on a solid strategic foundation.

Setting the right direction for a single service or an entire organisation’s digital activities should be a core focus for any leadership team today.

Most organisations have a strong sense of where they - or their services - are weak, and often where their greatest opportunities lie too. Where they often struggle is how to turn those senses into an actionable strategy.

Digital service strategy is largely focused on articulating a clear direction and how to maximise the opportunities available.

Leaning heavily on insight gained from customers, stakeholders, staff, peers and broader market trends, a robust service strategy lays out key principles, where to focus, and how to deliver.

A successful strategy is rich with ideas, articulates a vision that everyone can unite behind, and provides the practical guidance to make it all happen.

We help senior teams to invent new service models, establish strategic service frameworks and look ahead with confidence and enthusiasm.

Paid content models.

Charge for content and services, or shut up shop?

The internet is no longer a free-for-all. Service owners worldwide need to find new ways to generate revenue from content.

Paid content is one of today’s burning topics, and one that is unlikely to do anything but grow in importance over time.

Put simply, few content providers can survive on an ads-only model any longer. Whether serving consumers or professional audiences, intelligent approaches to content commercialisation are needed.

The options are varied, from simple subscriptions to sophisticated, multi-layered, user-responsive offerings.

The right model – and experience design to express it – can deliver a bright future. It is critical to learn form the experiences of others and shape an approach that is built on established learnings and new ideas in equal measure.

We have unparalleled experience in paid content. We help organisations make critical strategic decisions and create services to capitalise on them.

Data rich service interfaces.

Turning data into highly usable digital tools and services.

Whether mobile or on the desktop, data-powered services play a growing role in daily life.

Today, complex and valuable data services power many apps and services that we use.

Many of these services play a crucial role in everyday life: they’re the digital tools that we interact with to get things done.

Often used continuously by their end-users, the interfaces that drive them need to be simple, productive and rewarding.

By building a deep understanding of the people using the service, apparently complex services can be transformed into simple, highly optimised interfaces.

Modern interfaces need to respect ever-changing interaction expectations, incorporating the best of the experiences delivered by mouse, key, touch and other advanced interfaces.

We help to research, invent, plan, design, prototype and build the interfaces that make dynamic services simple and enjoyable.

Large scale website.

With great scale needs to come great approachability.

Some online services need to be big to do their job, but scale should not be an excuse for complexity.

Delivering large-scale websites always presents major challenges for the end-user experience.

Making it easy to get to the right place among thousands or even millions of pages – while delivering effectively on the core objectives of the site – demands a robust and rigorous approach to the service model.

Basic organisational architecture, user-facing functionality and on-screen layouts need to work hard with behind-the scenes data and technologies to deliver a rewarding and responsive experience.

The giants of the internet can – and must be – as agile and responsive as their smaller peers

We use well-proven multi-disciplinary methods to shape large-scale services that are equally rewarding for their owners and end-users.

Member and subscriber services.

Mastering the acquisition and retention of paying customers.

Today, time to market is often the critical factor in determining the success of new digital services.

The ‘acquisition funnel’ has become the obsessive focus of many online service owners.

A healthy influx of new customers combined with a solid, growing base of loyal customers is often the magic formula needed for commercial success.

And as many online service owners know, this formula is a hard one to get right.

Today’s digital customer is savvier, more demanding, and less tolerant than ever before, so member and subscriber services have to be founded on cutting-edge insight and intelligent design to have any chance of success.

The right strategy and service execution can combine immediate appeal and long-term value and deliver sustainable growth.

We research customer motivations, develop strategic models for long-term engagement and create optimised service experiences to convert prospects into loyal customers.

Multi-device services.

Joining up the experience across desktop and mobile platforms.

The next generation of successful digital services will demand all-day-long, cross-device experiences.

Everyone knows that the internet’s future is more about being mobile than being tied to a desk. But the real potential lies in ‘everywhere’ services that adapt to whatever context each user wants to use them in at the time.

Joined-up, persistent experiences present enormous opportunities for service owners.

Shaping the right service to deliver on this potential demands new forms of future-focused insight (it’s hard to know you want what you’ve never seen), novel strategic models and often radical new design approaches.

Whether considered NPD or R&D, exploring the potential of multi-device experiences is essential forward thinking for everyone.

We create unique service strategies and invent innovative concepts to power services that consumers will consider it hard to live without.

Clients

Service strategy and concepting, consumer research, experience design

Seven years of strategy, research and design for which.co.uk

Redesigning Australia’s most valuable online destination ninemsn.com

Strategic design of SCB's $20M PPP programme, Seeing is Believing

Paywall and service strategy, consumer research, experience design

Two generations of site strategy and experience design

Concepting and design of a revolutionary digital platform

Service strategy and concepting, research, experience design

Experience design for two generations of social collaboration platforms

Service strategy and concepting, experience design

Research and experience design to optimise conversion performance

Experience design for the new Macquarie Wrap service in the UK

Experience design of Seatwave's high-volume ticket broker application

Service strategy, user research, experience design for ice.org.uk

Experience design for NHM's OPAL initiative

Consumer research and experience design for various digital services

Service strategy for a major new digital resource for the housing sector.

Digital experience design of STC's main website and Wish List service

Brand development and service concepting.

Evaluation and service strategy for the science museum website.

Experience design of Folio's full e-commerce platform

Service strategy and conceptualisation of a major new music service

Strategy and experience design of the PPA's main website

What people say about us.

“WilsonFletcher were instrumental in creating a whole new dimension to reading and viewing newspaper content online.” Tristan Davies, Editor – Sunday Times online

“Work that will fuel our strategy for many years to come. Genius.” Mike Ellis, Science Museum

“If you're in the know, you know WilsonFletcher.” Dominic Young, Director of strategy, NI

Our work.

The output of our projects has been delivered into numerous markets and segments around the world. Here are a small selection of the services we've created.

ninemsn

Redesigning Australia’s most valuable online destination.

After many years as Australia’s - and one of the world’s - leading portals, ninemsn’s network home page needed a new direction. This single page reaches almost 75% of Australia’s online population and generates tens of millions of dollars in revenue each year. The redesign had to deliver substantial, real-world improvements to be considered a success.

Using an integrated programme of user research, experience strategy and page design, we worked hand-in-hand with the ninemsn team in Sydney to create a page that has already proven itself a success and can be the foundation of the ninemsn network for many years to come.

The Times & The Sunday Times

Arguably the most important step forward in the online newspaper industry since the earliest days of online news.

To say that The Times and Sunday Times were being watched by the entire global newspaper industry when they announced a move to paid content would be no understatement.

Our work helped shape everything from the core strategic approach to the paywall to the ultimate presentation of the services themselves.

which.co.uk

A continuation of our long and successful relationship with the UK’s consumer champion, Which?

A research-led approach helped us develop new site architecture and design, surfacing both commercial and campaign-driven content.

This redesign brings a radically improved environment for subscribers while adding a range of new free services for the mass market.

The look and feel of the site is distinctively Which?, making it easy for consumers to understand the extensive range of services.

Newstatesman

An online relaunch of this iconic current affairs publication

Our bold and distinctive design approach cements the site to the New Statesman brand, positioning it squarely among leading online publishers.

Templates were constructed to the highest accessibility standards, and were written to integrate easily with the New Statesman’s bespoke in-house publishing systems.

The results are both measureable and positive. Search engine rankings have soared and traffic is growing steadily, almost doubling its pre-launch levels.

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The London labs.

We own some of the UK’s most sophisticated user research facilities which we have worked hard to make the best they can be for our own research work, so people love to hire them for their own work too.

Find out more about the: London User Research Centre.

The Sydney labs.

We’re currently fitting out a whole new lab setup in Sydney which will be open soon - they’ll be ready very soon, so get in touch for more information.

New labs opening soon - register your interest