Parents Centre Forum
The Business
The Parentscentre forum was designed as a space for parents to exchange advice and support with advice provided by subject matter experts. After two years there were 15,000 registered users but only 3,000 message posts.
The brief
Greenhouse were asked to make substantial changes to the user experience, the design and to the technical functionality with the ultimate goal of creating a thriving parent community online.
The project
Following a design and usability review we provided a much simplified and more attractive design broken into blocks of function using colour and shape. The HTML code was upgraded to XHTML and non standard code was removed where possible.
The content architecture was made visible on the homepage of the forum through a combination of RSS feeds and a restructuring of content categories.
The result
Within a year of no marketing spend use of the forum has rocketed. There were 120,000 posts in the first year and a thriving community has grown. Parents now feel comfortable in exchanging experiences and communicating with the department in a unique way.
