Funky new graduate site for Minter Ellison

The players

Minter Ellison is an Australian-based, international law firm with offices in Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, Mongolia and the UK. They have a strong graduate program that seeks to attract the best graduates.

The problem

Minter Ellison had an existing graduate ‘site’, but it was within the main corporate website, which couldn’t be updated easily and used a legacy visual design. The graduate recruitment team wanted to bring fresh thinking to the design, a look and feel that would resonate with the target audience of young graduates. They also wanted to differentiate themselves from the competition and build on the new Minter Ellison branding.

Existing (old) site.

Minter Ellison needed a ‘micro’ site that was visually engaging, would attract graduates, and guide them quickly and easily through the application process. Minter Ellison also wanted to make sure that marketing and corporate info didn’t get in the way of what graduates needed.

The solution

Design

The Salsa Digital design focused on the target audience (young graduates) and the way that demographic consumes websites. This meant a design that moved away from text-heavy layouts and into a more experiential-based visual design. The site also had to be designed for mobiles and tablets first and foremost.

Our design team created a simple and colourful design that incorporates large imagery. The interface uses non-traditional navigation (page takeover for tablet and desktop) to provide simple and fast navigation that’s visual rather than text-based. The design wasn’t what Minter Ellison expected, but they loved it!

The homepage uses large imagery and visual ‘blocks’ to communicate key information.

Salsa Digital was also involved in the information architecture (IA), focusing on user experiences and the human focus Minter Ellison desired. For example, we pitched a section called ‘Stories’ to tell stories about people who work for Minter Ellison and what it means for them. This humanises a big brand into real people, getting ahead in life. This also tied in with the feeling of aspiration Minter Ellison wanted to convey, so graduates get a sense of what they can become.

The Stories page shows graduates who they can become at Minter Ellison.

We also refined the ‘Important dates’ section, so users can see only the dates relevant to their location (previously a long list of dates were displayed and graduates had to find the dates that matched their location). The dates and stages are presented visually in a timeline, again to appeal to the audience and so the steps can be seen quickly and easily.

CaseStudy_Hero_ME_GraduateCareers_inner.jpg

Finally, the design included a visual footer. We used this area of the site to fulfil the client’s desire to highlight its social media presence. The large and visual footer contains Instagram photos, a Twitter feed and icon links to Minter Ellison on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube.

Site build

The site is built in Drupal, a popular open-source content management system (CMS), and sits on the Acquia Professional cloud.

The benefits

The new design delivers on all of Minter Ellison’s requirements, providing an engaging experience tailored to their graduate audience. The design is simple, colourful, fresh (and funky) and delivers on key areas like humanising the company and presenting content in a clear and visual manner.

The Drupal CMS gives Minter Ellison the flexibility to edit all the content quickly and easily — a stark contrast to the old system.

Why Salsa Digital?

Salsa Digital was selected as Minter Ellison’s chosen digital partner for delivery of a number of projects, including the graduate website. Minter Ellison was impressed by our design and engineering pedigree and our commitment to digital innovation.

Since working on the Minter Ellison graduate site Salsa Digital has also been named Acquia’s Partner of the Year Asia Pacific and Japan (2016). Acquia provides the leading cloud platform for building, delivering, and optimising digital experiences using Drupal.