Description:

Historically, the aged care category has been a sea of sameness, with advertising portraying the audience in a cliche way, or worse yet, not at all. This approach has left our elders feeling unrepresented and reinforced the idea that moving into a retirement village will result in a loss of independence.

Oceania sees things differently, celebrating their audience as individuals who always have, and continue to live diverse lives – and retirement shouldn’t change that.

The problem was that Oceania’s website didn’t reflect that ambition. It was cluttered, overloaded with information, featured little-to-no imagery of their audience and was challenging to navigate for all ages.

So, beginning with a brand architecture review and overhaul, we developed a new design identity informed by a bold new brand platform – Believe in Better, that would go on to inform everything we did.

Oceania believes no one should be left behind, especially when it comes to technology and access to information, so we began by prioritising the site to be people-centric for our core audience of 65+, focusing on ease of use for them, while also creating a user-friendly experience for our secondary audience, the adult children.

The site seamlessly moves through Oceania’s mission to reimagine the retirement living and aged care experience, showcasing the brand values of 'Connection', 'Innovation', and 'Expertise'. Which is then followed by the information on independent living and aged care offerings, which are treated separately with photography and colours to give full clarity and depth to the information for each option.

Once users have the valuable information on who Oceania are and what their offerings entail, they’re able to navigate through the 40+ villages across the country with an interactive map and filters. In addition, sections were also designed and added to provide key information for staff and recruitment purposes, as well as investors and shareholders.

Right across the site, the photography was used as an opportunity to show 'Better' in action, portraying real residents with a sense of purpose and connection showing lives lived to the fullest, in moments of enjoyment, contemplation or connection.

As a result of the new site and despite our audience being considered less technically savvy, the intuitive design saw a dramatic increase in performance for our core demographic of 65+, including a 245% increase in page views, a 54% improvement in bounce rates and nearly double the number of viewers (65+).

The modern, mobile-first design has also resulted in a 36% increase in people engaging with the site on mobile or tablet than the previous one, which saw very limited interaction.

Overall, by simplifying the user journey, our intended users viewed more pages, understood the content and in turn made more calls to the Village Managers to make viewing appointments.

Ensuring our audience was at the centre of every decision we made gave them access to the information they needed to make critical decisions about their next big life move.