16 Dec 2022

Christmas Giving at Catch

At Catch, we like to make sure we give something back at this time of year. To help us do so as a team, we scrapped the traditional - and slightly cringeworthy - office Secret Santa in 2019.

Instead, we take part in two charity initiatives - Christmas Jumper Day and Kids Out’s Giving Tree scheme.

Christmas Jumper Day is Save the Children's annual event which raises money for children in the UK and across the world. Every December, we all dust off our most festive jumpers (apart from Gary, our Tech Director, who happily wears his all month) and make donations to Save the Children. We’re happy to say we hit our target very quickly this year.

Designed to be a fun alternative to the traditional Secret Santa, Giving Tree is not only simple to get involved with but a fun exercise for the whole office! Rather than buy each other cheap - and occasionally tacky! - Secret Santa gifts, instead we each buy something from the Giving Tree shop. The gifts are then given directly to children in refuge homes and other children across the country who are in great need, helping make Christmas the special time of year it should be.

If you’d like to take part in the Giving Tree scheme, you can do so here.

05 Feb 2019

A new generation of students

This week we launched the first phase of the brand new University of Salford website.

The website is part of a large digital transformation project currently being undertaken by the University of Salford, with Catch working as their digital partner to help transform their public facing website to meet the needs of a new generation of students.

In this first phase a brand new course finder to improve the user experience for current and prospective students finding out about the University’s offering.

This project presented the ideal opportunity to audit content and improve the user experience across the site. With so many facets of the University managing disparate sections of the site, thousands of unique pages had been created using multiple content management systems and microsites.

The previous site was very organisation-centric so the new site presented the chance to move to a more user-centred experience. In order to gather requirements from both the University’s internal stakeholders and the students’ perspective, a huge amount of user research was undertaken to inform the UX, including interviews and workshops. We also collected feedback from the previous site to highlight areas of improvement, in addition to new feature requests and suggestions.

This MVP site launch is just beginning and we’ll continue to deliver updates throughout 2019 against our roadmap, with exciting new features, always based on our users’ feedback.

Visit https://beta.salford.ac.uk/ to see the work in action.