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nib is one of Australia’s largest and oldest health insurers, formed in 1953, and it has over 1.7 million members across their five brands in Australia and New Zealand.
With a conglomerate that size, they have a huge amount of content spread across their ecosystem (digital, not environmental). They needed someone who could come in and centralise all of that content into one content management system and standardise their different design implementations.
And who was the man for the job?! It was in fact not one man (me), but a team of incredibly talented people who I would work again with in a heartbeat; however, I was the lead experience designer and one of the people running point on the project over a 4-year engagement.
With so much content came a lot of inconsistencies, different content licenses, and CMS environments (27, to be precise). The amount of effort involved in maintaining all of these different content areas was incredibly time-consuming and, ultimately, expensive. In total, nib had over 1,500 webpages, but over 80% of the components used on these pages were outdated and inconsistent with the newest nib’s design guidelines.
Updating the content was a slow process; a lot of the content depended on a developer to update it because it was hosted on static sites with legacy technology stacks.
And if nib wanted to update a component’s design, it wouldn’t deploy across every channel; a developer would have to update it in every instance e.g. if a menu item was added to the navigation, it had to be updated manually on every instance across the ecosystem.
These problems meant that the system couldn't scale for new businesses or channels.
Centralise all of nib’s content into a single platform and deliver a unified user experience for all end-users, reduce costs, maintenance and put content control in the hands of the editors.
My team and I worked hand-in-hand with the nib team to deliver a solution using Contentful; one of the most powerful and scalable content platforms (their words but I agree).
I was brought on to lead the five year engagement as we developed nib’s design language system (meshdesignsystem.com), unified their technology stacks and created scalable, lookless content models that could grow with their organisation.
We created a hybrid squad containing team members from both nib and Mudbath to work as a single unit with combined scrums. As with every project, the first steps were conducting research, reviewing quantitative data, and conducting a multitude of workshops with nib’s different business units to understand the breadth of the project and its requirements. This led to the creation of the most important artefact of any project: the project roadmap.
We run our design and development teams using a dual-track delivery methodology. The design team would design the next initiative in a sprint, refine it, and finalise it with the client’s approval. In the next sprint, the development team will produce and launch the work. In the background of the development team in the same sprint, the design team would design the next initiative, ready for the development team in the next sprint. We would follow this process for the entire project for optimum efficiency.
We ran an agile approach to each initiative which would always began with a discovery phase. We would conduct workshops with the relevant business units in order to understand the business and user requirements.
We would then propose design and development solutions to nib, conducting user testing if the initiative required it, and iterate based on feedback. When the proposed solution was signed off, we would then break the initiative down into epics and adjust them accordingly to deliver that piece of work in the client’s timeframe.
Due to our agile way of working, Mudbath would often deliver an entire page uplift or redesign within a single sprint if pre-existing components were used.
By following our iterative release plan, our squad only had to create the necessary components and content models required for each initiative and would reuse components created during that phase, in future releases. This led to smaller and faster releases that would improve future releases based on the business and user feedback.
Probably the greatest feature of the content platform is its ability to simply update styling across its entire ecosystem.
If a component needed updating, the design team would design the new implementation, the development team would code the changes and publish them, and the new updates would occur not only across the main website but to every sub-brand as well.
This was especially useful when it came to nib’s news, advice, and article space: the checkup. With a new brand update inbound that was going to affect the entire digital and print experience, the checkup was one of the first spaces to test this incredibly powerful feature. The new brand utilised new brand colours, fonts, and iconography. The components had improved over time, and the user experience wasn't going to change (for the time being). The development team added in the variables and image updates, hit publish, and voila, the entire site was rebranded within an hour.
It’s because of this functionality that the content platform will be able to grow with nib and be able to handle any updates that the brand goes through in the future.
The final results were a resounding success that have gone on to shape nib into the future. The content platform gave nib a seamless multi-channel content distribution system, including voice assistants. That was easy to use, significantly cheaper and could make updates to the entire ecosystem in hours, rather than weeks.
The last step was to give full control over to nib. It was a sad moment; mudbath and nib had ceased to function as separate units and worked together as a unified team, with little distinction between who was the client and who was the agency. But this was always the plan, and we couldn’t have left the engagement with a happier client and what will always be regarded as one of our mudbath's greatest success stories.
