Overhauling the end-to-end experience for The Old Vic
Client
The Old Vic
Services
UX & UI // Web Development // Tessitura Integration
The client
The Old Vic is an independent powerhouse for entertainment and education. A not-for-profit theatre, proud to be a charity. The Old Vic believe that theatre makes the world better and that anyone should be able to access and experience it – to understand it, entertain it and benefit from it.
The Old Vic's collective mission is to invigorate, inspire and open doors through world-class theatre for all. The Old Vic is for anyone, and always will be. For generations to come.
The brief
We were originally asked to take over their old site in a caretaker capacity, however, it quickly became apparent that the best solution would be to start afresh, in order to solve their challenges from the ground up. We were delighted when they asked us to assist them in the redesign and redevelopment of their existing marketing site and purchase path. Their existing website had aged over time due to numerous factors, ranging from dated technology to a vast range of content that had grown over time and lost its focus.
Equally, The Old Vic was looking for numerous customisations around their purchase path, leveraging Tessitura which couldn’t be facilitated by their existing systems.
There was also the inclusion of a two-phase approach to The Old Vic’s educational offering, The Hub. An area aimed at offering an inclusive route into the sector, through a range of interactive learning opportunities, guides, quizzes, and workshops.
Key challenges
1. A more accessible purchase path as part of their access scheme.
2. A revitalised education hub to reach new audiences.
3. A fresh approach to how content can best serve users.
Why us
The Old Vic opted to work with After Digital due to our knowledge and experience within the Arts & Culture sector as well as our partnership with Tessitura. Our approach to any project involves a thorough discovery period to understand each client's exact requirements, and this was no different. Through our workshops, we planned how best to meet users' needs, organise content and templates to form the marketing site, as well as looking at what functionality was desired to optimise their purchase path. The Old Vic was looking for various bespoke features to improve the user experience online and the staff experience maintaining the website.
To achieve this, The Old Vic opted to use our own Skyway product. Allowing them to realise a range of flexibility around their ticketing purchase paths usability and branding, using Skyway’s rich API integration with Tessitura.
Challenges
The project kicked off at the beginning of 2021. Nobody could have predicted the challenges that were brought upon us by the pandemic. With many organisations being forced to close their doors, the arts and culture sector was almost decimated overnight.
With live/in-person events cancelled all over the world, The Old Vic was no exception. Despite receiving no regular public subsidy, and its doors being forced to shut, The Old Vic continued to look at how it could adapt and continue to perform and raise funds to continue its mission.
The pandemic was perhaps one of the greatest drivers for digital transformation in history, disrupting every sector, and in many cases meant a digital-first approach was taken and was key to enabling business continuity. Since the Pandemic, we’ve seen a huge acceleration in consumer appetite for automated/digital approaches to many aspects of the customer experience, including an overwhelming preference for cashless payment options, and a huge increase in mobile ticketing.
As the saying goes, the show must go on. The Old Vic was exploring how core areas such as performances, fund-raising, and education could shift to an online world, allowing them to continue reaching audiences and delivering value in the interim.
Like so many, we dared to hope that the pandemic would be a temporary blip, but we knew we must base our thinking on both the near-future living with it and what a post-pandemic future looks like in order to ensure the longevity and success of the website in the post-pandemic world.
Much like the rest of the world, we at After Digital also needed to adapt, even as digital practitioners, we value face-to-face time onsite with clients where possible. Allowing us to see the world our clients see. Much like The Old Vic moving many of its events online, we looked to move our entire discovery process online as well. After many intense Zoom meetings and virtual whiteboard sessions, we uncovered various challenges and opportunities to improve the website.
What did we find out about said challenges?
Having worked to understand The Old Vic’s audience, their needs and challenges, our first port of call was to create a better strategy for handling content. The existing website was deeply nested and the limited layouts and flexibility in how content could be structured meant much content was hidden behind layers of links and landing pages.
We also took a holistic view of their product and events offering, identifying existing challenges both their users and the ticketing team faced.
A revitalised Education Hub
There was also the matter of The Old Vic’s educational resource, The Hub. Which was a wealth of content in itself which was nested within the existing website. We worked with The Old Vic to plan a two phase approach to migrate the content to a more scalable format first, and then develop a more interactive and engaging way of displaying this content through rich media and videos. The Hub offers a range of virtual workshops with step-by-step breakdowns and completion tracking, allowing users to measure their progress, and continue where they left off.
A seat map geared towards accessibility
The Old Vic offers a generous access scheme, which allows those with a (free) access membership to choose any seat in the auditorium for a reduced price. Additionally, some seats have pre-determined benefits such as offering a good view of the BSL interpreter.
The seatmap offers custom filters visible to those with an access membership, allowing users to filter for seats which offer the best view of the BSL interpreter/the audio descriptions/the captions. We also worked to include some smaller accessibility improvements, ensuring seat prices are distinguished using a letter as well as a colour, ensuring the seat map is accessible to colourblind users.
Virtual events – booking form
The pandemic saw the industry shift focus to the virtual world, experimenting with how performances could live on whilst people remained in their homes. We took this opportunity to reflect on how the website could offer a best-in-class experience for users booking both physical and virtual.
We created a seamless purchase path that would allow The Old Vic to sell multiple tickets whilst collecting users' details, automating data collection for the box office team, and allowing them to easily send Zoom broadcasts to the right users. We also offered the ability for users to buy multiple tickets if they were able to/if they were watching with a group. We took care to explain all this during the booking journey, ensuring users could easily choose the option most suitable to them.
A loyalty scheme that delivers value for customers and theatres alike
To encourage repeat custom, The Old Vic established a brand new loyalty scheme, allowing users to collect points for every pound spent, which they would then be able to puttowards future purchases such as tickets and programmes in the future. We created a series of compelling upsells and made use of the loyalty scheme's distinct teal and black branding to aid in recognition and highlight the value of points against any relevant purchases.
We created a series of upsells that would show users the value of their prospective purchase, encouraging adoption, and even allowing users to retrospectively sign up upon confirmation of their purchase where they could join with just a single click.
Users can monitor their points balance in the account area, and so far adoption of the scheme has exceeded well beyond our original expectations.
An end-to-end branded experience
The Old Vic’s branding is iconic. The bold, extended type and rich colours are used to create bold typographic artwork. We worked to ensure this wasn’t lost throughout the site. Skyway allows us to style and brand every step of the various booking journeys, creating a bespoke look and feel and consistent experience for users. This offers users a premium experience and allows The Old Vic to create consistency around their wider marketing effort. Memberships, the loyalty scheme, donation upsells and access memberships all received custom treatment to ensure consistency and ensure any communications felt recognisable.
Within the purchase path, we were especially careful to communicate brand and visual impact (making use of the distinctive wide titles and bold colour schemes) while also ensuring accessibility and usability (whitespace, soft grey shades, strict adherence to the grid) which leads users through the purchase path confidently and efficiently, creating a purchase path that not only looks great but offers an excellent user experience.