Background

As a design team working in an agency with a strong emphasis on user-centred practice, we spend a lot of time getting to know not only a client’s organisation and stakeholders, but also its audiences and users; determining how they are navigating the website, which issues they are facing and which opportunities we can uncover to create a better user experience.

The benefits of this process are not limited to the fact that it ensures the new site meets the needs of both the organisation and its users. The process also makes the site very flexible in itself, meaning it can be adapted to the unique needs and set up of each organisation.

Working in a full-service agency, usually we support client projects from initial discussions all the way to build and handoff—and often even beyond that. However, as our ways of working are designed to be tailored to each client, we are able to apply our UX processes to other types of projects as well. Recently, we were fortunate to have been brought onboard as an external design team by our friends at Peppered, bringing our UX expertise to a project with one of their long-standing clients, De Doelen. 

Background

Peppered creates premium websites for the arts and culture sector across Europe. They were looking for a UX and design partner to collaborate with, to provide their clients with the opportunity to enhance and personalise the user experience of their existing website within the Peppered platform. 

Coming to the project as an external design team, we worked to familiarise ourselves with the platform, getting to know how Peppered’s ‘parts’ interact to form a flexible website, and learning how staff administer and customise the site using Peppered’s CMS. While our process centres around users and their experience navigating the site, we wanted to ensure that any suggestions we would make to improve the user experience would be practical and actionable.

The Organisation

In the first instalment of our ongoing collaboration with Peppered, we worked with Rotterdam-based cultural venue and concert hall, de Doelen. Situated in the heart of the city, de Doelen is seen to have huge historic and cultural value, as well as being the most visited venue for the performing arts in Rotterdam. The venue holds around 1,200 events per year, including 600 concerts. 

We were delighted to work with de Doelen and Peppered on this collaboration to enhance the look and feel of the website and to understand what their users wanted from the website, so we headed off to Rotterdam to begin discovery!

Research & Discovery

One of the goals of the redesign was to attract new groups of audiences to the venue. To understand who was using the site, we reviewed audience data and set up tracking tools to observe user behaviour. Researching the different types of visitors, we divided the audience into segments based on demographic information and Rotterdam Festivals' extensive data.

During our in-person discovery sessions, we worked with stakeholders to extract user personas specific to de Doelen from our audience segmentation work. Building a varied array of personas was key to understanding and catering to different user needs—including both their core audience and new groups they’d like to attract to the venue.

With de Doelen planning to expand their offering, we used a blank-canvas approach to map out a new information architecture for the site. The personas were helpful in framing these discussions, making sure each group’s needs and goals were taken into account. We were able to map out the core pages and sort them into logical groups for more intuitive navigation.

De Doelen prides itself on its diverse programming, so we worked to create a content hierarchy which showcases the full range of genres available, while still giving room to more general pieces of information users would be looking for. Defining a clear hierarchy at this stage also gave us a better understanding of the visual hierarchy components we would need in the next phase.

During the design phase, we used the insights gathered during discovery to build key pages and templates. We worked with Peppered to use both existing CMS parts and new bespoke features to enhance the user experience.