Case Study - MHScot Workplace Wellbeing
The Scottish Tech Army has been working closely with MHScot Workplace Wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic to help move their services online.
MHScot Workplace Wellbeing is Scotland’s first social enterprise focusing on stress prevention and early mental health prevention in the workplace. MHScot provides courses, workshops, support and advice services to everyone that makes up an employer’s workforce.
MHScot found out about The Scottish Tech Army in the Social Enterprise Scotland newsletter which had given a shout-out to the group. Being a small team with varying technical knowledge and having to accelerate the process of digitising their services due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they approached the Scottish Tech Army to help with the project.
Catherine Eadie from MHScot Workplace Wellbeing said: “We were looking at how we were going to do digital delivery and knew our services would translate online but all of the messaging on our website was geared up for face-to-face delivery. We also needed someone to look at the usability of our website which looked fantastic but was overwhelmed by imagery.”
Public Sector Service Designer Katie Dickerson joined the Scottish Tech Army after finding out about the group in a Service Design slack channel. Katie was keen to use her skills to help others during her increased time indoors this year and thought the Scottish Tech Army was a great way to do that.
Katie and Catherine worked closely on the project and mapped out how the website should take shape, experimented with ideas and decided together what worked best. Katie’s skills also helped with the need for succinct messaging and configuring the layout. Katie looked after the user testing process, focusing on the customer journey and how to secure positive site metrics that lead to bookings and enquiries. Katie also shared knowledge of how to make the site more accessibility friendly.
Katie said: “I really enjoyed working with Catherine at MHScot - she had a solid technical knowledge and was very open to learning about how to improve the user experience on her website. We were able to make improvements that have had a big impact on organic traffic, enquiry conversion rate and engagement with the content, which is really satisfying. It was great to be able to use my skills in a completely different way than I do at work, plus help a non-profit in the process.”
When the staff at MHScot Workplace Wellbeing returned from furlough in September, the site was ready and both volunteers and staff were able to hit the ground running.
Catherine said: “As a Micro Social Enterprise our capacity is stretched when it comes to keeping our website fresh and updated so we reached out to STA during Covid-19 when we needed to move all our services online. Katie provided us with her excellent insight and tools so that the website could be analysed, assessed and re-written and designed to have a greater reach and be more accessible. We are delighted with the results!”