Transforming HR and business solutions at scale

With 35 years of experience, Peninsula is an in-house HR department for SMEs, offering tailored guidance in managing employees and employment challenges.

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Our brief for digital enablement for Peninsula focussed on four areas:

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1. Attracting qualified high-value leads at the top of the funnel

2. Optimising the service to create efficiencies and scalability

3. Positioning Peninsula as an industry leader to improve lead acquisition

4. Developing new products to digitise their customer experience 

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Following research with stakeholders and customers, we identified key areas of strength, opportunities and pressing tech problems. This led us to create an end-to-end service blueprint which mapped out Peninsula's whole customer journey and visualised our strategic priorities.

Our goal was to create an approachable and relatable identity that resonated with existing and potential customers whilst cementing Peninsula as an industry leader.

A workshop was the cornerstone for formulating design principles that encapsulated its brand's identity and guided the development of its new platform.

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• Master of All Trades Design: Inclusivity takes centre stage. Authentic imagery representing diverse industries is combined with an inclusive tone and easy-to-understand content.
• Keeping It Simple Design: Complex matters are broken down visually and through minimalist icons, mirroring the straightforward tone and content strategy.
• A Helping Hand Design: The design leverages colour as a guide. Distinctive colours for different services and supportive secondary shades match the supportive tone and content style.
• Down-to-Earth Experts Design: Peninsula's expertise is delivered with a friendly and relatable demeanour, epitomised through bold typography and sketches.
• Serious, Never Scary Design: An approach that balances seriousness with a human touch, mirrored in the tone and content strategy.

The existing navigation posed challenges, with its obscured services and extensive sub-nav dropdowns causing confusion for users. To solve these issues, a card sorting research exercise and IA workshop informed the creation of a new, user-centric navigation. This included separating services into distinct navigation links, simplifying top navigation, and removing duplicate page links.

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The new design embraced the art direction principles established earlier, establishing a friendlier and more approachable brand image. This was reflected in the choice of a softer yet professional font, the strategic use of the brand's red colour to evoke trust without alarm, and the incorporation of natural imagery to convey approachability and relatability.

Our initial user research found that HR options are overwhelming for employers.​ They don't know what value for money is in HR, and they're time-poor, especially those in crisis. To help solve this, we proposed a self-assessment tool that guided users through identifying their HR needs, accessing relevant resources, and booking appointments with specialised advisors.

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This solution offers a bespoke journey for new leads, connects them to relevant teams quicker and ultimately enables Peninsula to qualify the level of urgency for each lead and provide a tailored service.

Working with the technical team at Peninsula, we established a strategy that leveraged their current internal technical capability whilst maintaining the highest standard of code crafting possible.

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Using a headless CMS called Dato allowed us to very quickly create a content-managed website with ease. Coupled with a Front End powered by Gatsby and components written in React, we were able to build on our technical skills and improve our SaaS diversity by learning both a new CMS and site generation framework.

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This allowed us to produce an excellent product with speed due to the ability to reuse our components and database models across the platform.

Compared with Peninsula's previous platform, we delivered a 30% increase in conversions - successfully driving high-value leads into the business and positioning Peninsula as a market leader in HR and business solutions.