Australian mental health organization transforms user experience with composable approach
Migrating mental wellness to XM Cloud.
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At an inspiring breakout session at Sitecore Symposium 2024, Jim Nelson, Head of Digital, Beyond Blue, and Sean Holmesby, Senior Solutions Architect, Sitecore provided insights into how and why Australian mental health organization Beyond Blue made the move to Sitecore XM Cloud.
Beyond Blue’s mission
Founded over two decades ago, when mental health challenges were rarely spoken about, Beyond Blue has changed the conversation, changed the system, and helped tens of millions of Australians with advice, support, and information. Today, Beyond Blue is Australia’s most trusted, recognized, and visited mental health organization.
Opening the session, Nelson shared some startling statistics:
2 in 5 Australians have experienced a mental health condition in their lifetime.
One third of people in Australia will experience an anxiety condition in their lifetime.
1 in 7 people in Australia will experience depression in their lifetime.
On average, 9 people in Australia take their own lives every day–7 of whom are men.
Digital transformation objectives
The solution that underpinned Beyond Blue’s website was not equipped to scale and amplify the organization’s message and services. In addition, their CMS’ license was nearing expiry, so there was a sense of urgency to find a replacement that offered everything Beyond Blue needed to realize their vision.
To address current website issues and improve the user experience for people with mental health challenges, the team focused on three achievable, measurable goals:
- Performance.
- Scalability.
- An uplifted user experience.
Nelson explained how they used an MVP approach, focusing on high-impact pages. Looking at the most viewed and engaged with pages as opposed to pages that have accumulated over time, they discovered that 95% of user interaction considered to be ‘impactful’ was based on just 67 pages from a total of over 1400 pages.
Prioritizing these 67 pages, the team also set out to enhance the user experience, ensuring the navigation process was seamless and allowed users to easily access the information and services they needed as quickly and effortlessly as possible.
Building a robust, intelligent solution
Explaining that they wanted to use as much of Beyond Blue’s existing solution as possible, Holmesby shared the tools and technology used by the team:
- Bitbucket for source control.
- Azure DevOps for building pipelines.
- Jira and Confluence for project management.
- Figma for design.
- Sitecore XM Cloud to ensure fast, reliable performance.
- Sitecore Experience Edge for content delivery to the application.
- Next.js head application running on Vercel.
- Sitecore Search for indexing intelligent website search.
- Existing Form Assembly for website forms.
- Sitecore Personalize and XM Cloud for website personalization.
By adopting a composable approach, they were able to build a completely customized solution using a mix of Beyond Blue’s existing technology and Sitecore solutions.
Partnering with Luminary, a Melbourne-based agency that specializes in nonprofits, they assembled a blended cross-functional tiger team with strong, applicable skills from ecommerce, financial, and DevOps backgrounds.
With this team in place, it was possible to deliver in sprints, on a phase-by-phase basis including design, development, and deployment, and meet each target in a timely and efficient way.
Success metrics
The Sitecore XM Cloud platform was deployed quickly and within budget thanks to effective collaboration between Beyond Blue, Sitecore, and Luminary.
Within a six-month timeframe (end-to-end), the organization achieved:
- Performance improvements.
- Decrease in bounce rate post-launch.
- Increase in user engagement metrics.
- Improved accessibility features.
- Operational continuity with zero downtime.
Challenges and lessons learned
To ensure the content migrated into a new information architecture as smoothly as possible, not only did the team provide training, showcases, and demos, but content authors were also permitted to test the solution as soon as it was ready. This meant issues could be identified as soon as possible and enabled continuous improvement.
To keep the project moving forward, the team also encouraged a progress over perfection mindset and flexible acceptance criteria.
At the same time, they put a high value on protecting all team members from burnout and ensured everyone’s efforts were acknowledged.
Beyond Blue is now looking at introducing further enhancements including offering content in other languages and additional personalization.
Commenting on Beyond Blue’s composable digital transformation experience with Sitecore, Nelson said:
We achieved so much, and we can do so much more.
Discover more about Beyond Blue’s Sitecore journey and success story.