First Choice Homes Oldham

Made By Factory was tasked with creating a new sub-brand for the customer involvement department at First Choice Homes Oldham. The community involvement team sought a more personal way to involve their service users.

First Choice Homes have a variety of ways customers can be involved. From participating in customer forums to volunteering in a counsel capacity, there are several things to choose from. Therefore we needed to create some designs that could appeal to specific users.

Working with FCHO, our aim was to appeal to a wide customer base and a variety of ability skillset. The housing demographic is difficult. it encompasses everyone. There is no real differentiation between people renting their homes in terms of skill, education, ethnicity, age or religion. It’s a wide mix. A mix which represents a subset of the demographic of the Oldham borough.

We decided to make an array of characters and match them to particular skills or abilities. The matches were completely random however, we had used a young character to appeal to young people and so forth. Some of our characters were touting social skills, IT skills, planning, mystery shopping and a variety of other things.

First Choice Homes mission is to create thriving and independent communities

We found inspiration in Google’s Material Design principles and also their material colour palette. Material Design has become synonymous with a great deal of mobile centric user design because of it’s simplicity. As such it has a great deal of familiarity.

Firstly, we created our characters. We created Tim, Andi, Dipesh, Avril and Suzi to start with. Four characters were for the initial customer involvement posters and in addition, any subsequent ones were used in other creatives. We also matched each character with a task. Andi was our VIP Superstar. Tim was our neighbourhood planner. Suzi was our mystery shopper and Dipesh, our digital champion.

Finally, we matched our characters with a material colour palette background and appropriate wording. The result is these colourful and eyecatching designs!