[interview] the project story
Project Overview
One of Victoria's largest and most iconic events, the Royal Melbourne Show needed a new responsive website that reflected it's vibrant celebration of animals, agriculture, food & art. The site needed to present a huge range of events and activities across the 10 days of the Show, in a way that was easy to navigate and fun to explore.
Project Commissioner
The Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria
Project Creator
Team
Andy Hibbert - Commercial Director
Hannah Dingli - Project Manager
Duncan Legge - Design and UX Lead
Mike Hopkins - Front End Developer
Chris Campbell - Front End Developer
Sam Sperling - Lead .NET Lead Developer
Thai Tran - .NET Developer
Project Brief
Attracting over half a million visitors every September, the Royal Melbourne Show is Victoria's largest and most iconic annual community event.
In recent years, the Show found itself competing in an increasingly busy and fragmented event landscape. In order to continue to be Victoria’s premium family event, the Show approached Monkii to reinvigorate it's current website.
Our objectives here were clear:
• Increase reach, impact and value
• Increase user engagement
• To grow pre-event ticket sales
• Deliver a world class user experience
Accomplishing this needed a full overhaul of the site's information architecture, user experience, and visual design - as well as a move to a fully responsive platform.
Project Innovation/Need
The Show had a perception issue, with the public seeing it as just representing animals, carnival rides and showbags, when the reality was so much more. We needed to present the Show in a new light, one that was as much about high-end gourmet dining and world class entertainment, as it was about agriculture and best-in-show awards.
In combination with a fresh marketing perspective, our new design presents the Show in this new light, with a modern, attractive visual design and an intuitive interface that easily showcases the best it has to offer.
Focus was also put towards integrating marketing messages into event and content pages, the outcome of which can be seen in the seamless integration of ticket promotions with event listings.
Design Challenge
One of the primary challenges with this project was to present the full breadth of the Show's event offering, without overwhelming the user. The Show offers hundreds of events across it's 10 day running time, including live music, cooking, animal judging, competitions, exhibitions and workshops - as well as the rides and showbags the Show is famous for.
We accomplished this with a two-pronged approach.
Firstly, users can browse using primary navigation, which was the result of research and workshops to develop a clear IA targeted at users. Following from there, each page template was optimised for supreme readability and intuitive interaction.
The second approach was a daily planner, presenting all events in a browsable list. For power users, users can select categories they are interested in, or browse by particular days and times.
No matter the method, users can quickly 'favourite' items. This puts them in their shortlist, where at a click users can select their desired day and be presented with a daily itinerary of their shortlisted events.
User Experience
The user experience was focused on serving all user groups, no matter the device.
No matter which type of content the user was viewing, they were also exposed to relevant promotional offers and related content. This ensured that users never felt like they'd reached the 'end' of content - there was always something new and exciting to explore at the Show!
Digital Experience - Website - Product
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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