An award-winning milestone in a multi-year digital partnership with Boots

The website components redesign and optimisation were achieved through the strategic use of PWA technology, accessibility-first design, and robust UX measurement. Let’s take a closer look across the 3 focus areas: 

VML proposed a Progressive Web App (PWA) to deliver an app-like experience directly through mobile browsers and implemented several key features to support it. Notable features include:

- Users can add the app to their home screens for quick, native-like access;

- Push notifications provide official updates, job availability, and seasonal campaign alerts;  

- Connectivity status messages inform users when they are offline or experiencing low connectivity;  

- Advanced caching techniques improve load times and ensures smooth performance;  

- Fallback offline support for main pages allows access to key information without a network;

- An intuitive user guide helps first-time users navigate the platform effectively. 

VML conducted a discovery phase of accessibility, which covered a wide variety of tools and analysed the current website.  This analysis helped in identifying the website’s issues, addressing them with the following tools: 

- Text Spacing 

- Wave 

- NDVA  

- Colour contrast checker 

- Voiceover (iPhone) 

- Talkback (Android) 

- Keyboard Accessibility 

- W3C markup validator 

After these issues were rectified and the tools implemented, the site achieved AA compliance for accessibility. To ensure the website remains accessible for all new features and content, VML continues to perform accessibility audits for all new implementations as well as on annual basis. 

VML’s findings presented key recommendations, grounded in real user behaviour, to improve the website incrementally. To understand and measure customer loyalty and satisfaction, we analysed user feedback and Net Promoter Score (NPS). We personalised the homepage to make it more engaging based on preferred location, users’ business areas, search criteria, search history, past behaviour, and preferred users’ career areas, delivering a tailored experience. In addition, VML provided actionable recommendations to improve page layouts, calls to action (CTAs), and content hierarchy.