Browzer

The ask

Browzer was founded by two friends who saw an opportunity to revolutionise student communication. Having been in the HE industry for years they realised that staff wrestled with disjointed systems to communicate consistently with students. By building an easy way for staff to administer online content we could address the key challenges:

Ability to publish on multiple devices
Support for more flexible content presentation
A centralised hub for creating content

Our Approach

Browzer is the lifestyle magazine by Campus Life, the UK’s most widely read student comms platform. As they build up a huge and loyal community it was about time to adapt and shift the distribution of their content to an online platform. To easily distribute their content and engage with their community Browzer needed to become a future proof content platform with a modular and scalable ecosystem that enables their team to make the most out of every content piece and also develop new content formats easily.

Campus Life came to us with an idea. We started day one with a design sprint to validate their idea. By the end of week one we conducted our first round of user testing and interviews.

A resource for right now

Based on the requirements we created a state of the art infrastructure based on a CMS (Concrete) that empowers the team to create and orchestrate their content efficiently. This approach not only allows authors to create content once and publish it multiple times, it also supports future growth through content partnerships.

Designing the interface

Building a content platform is one thing, building a delightful one is quite another. We strived to design an experience that followed guidelines for Material while also triggering the right amount of personality and direction to the user at the right times.

The new direction aims to translate Browzer’s personality into a visual language that could be elegant and bold, but also playful and fresh. The result is a unique style that has a strong personality with a quirky touch.

Emphasising collaboration

Campuslife brought their talented team, with their range of expertise, to be deeply involved and thoughtfully vocal in all project stages, which aligned well with our multi-disciplinary team. We collaborated at every step, through weekly work sessions, active copy discussions, and work-in-progress sharing and conversations. The team was enthusiastic and willing to be open and introspective, which allowed us to push boundaries and add unexpected interactive magic—while keeping the content simple, clear, and accurate.

Meaningful impact

With the implementation of the menu project we added yet another layer of quality to the editorial workflows enabling the Campus Life team to address user needs born from a valuable exchange of thoughts and reactions to content insights. The Campus Life team is now well equipped with on page tools and content formats both on-page and social to engage readers into a positive and vibrant community.

• 93% Of users identify
Browzer content as "meaningful”
• 80+ Custom-built administrative tools
• A sector leading platform
• Omnichannel experience
• Scalable solution