Project Overview
Destination Melbourne (DM) is the peak Melbourne tourism body aimed at maximising visitation to the Greater Melbourne area. The team champions several marketing initiatives that include the Melbourne Official Visitor Guide, but identified an opportunity to reinvigorate its award-winning Discover Your Own Backyard (DYOB) campaign with a new responsive website.
The existing DYOB website was dated and featured a clunky search experience that made discovering local events, eateries, and activities unnecessarily difficult.
We delivered a website that was both fun and easy to navigate. Seamless integrations with operator listings from both the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse (ATDW) and Zomato showcase what to see, do, eat, and drink in the “World’s Most Livable City”.
The new DYOB platform builds upon Melbourne’s vibrant “precincts” as the hub of locale-specific content, grouping local attractions and areas of interest, and inspiring visitation. To assist prospective visitors and locals surface information and events of interest, we built out a comprehensive search interface that catered to geographical filters as well as interest categories, driving a powerful search/discovery experience.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Deborah Betteto
Flavio Argemi
Matt Cordell
Rom Palmas
Lachlan Gibbs
Francesca Buratti
Project Brief
To improve on the look, feel, and functionality of DYOB’s existing website, the team engaged us to design a user experience that would better showcase the kinds of food, attractions, events, and other experiences users could expect when venturing out in Melbourne. Better navigability was essential to ensure users could quickly surface information of interest without feeling overwhelmed. Third-party integrations with ATDW and Zomato both improve the overall experience and reduce content entry requirements; our challenge was to present these in a way that was smart, sharp, and consistent.
Finally, a new DYOB brand guide positioned the brand as fun, vibrant, and colourful, and the website experience needed to reflect and extend this in the digital medium.
Project Need
The visiting friends and relatives (VFR) market is a major contributor to Melbourne’s economy, worth upwards of $3.0 billion. DYOB taps into this market by working collaboratively with councils to educate hosts about Melbourne’s sights and sounds and, ultimately, influence visitor behaviour. The team recognised the existing website was not delivering on this goal: it neither made a compelling case for hosts and prospective visitors, nor did it satisfy the needs of Melbourne councils and individual travel and tourism operators.
DYOB’s mission is to get local Melburnians excited about the opportunities and experiences available to them right at home, in line with best practice “precinct marketing”. We strategised a number of ways to bring this alive: in addition to individual listings pages powered by a slick search interface, we also introduced a ‘Stories’ section where DM staff could publish content- and image-rich articles.
The complexity of this project came from the sheer volume of content needed on the site, and the detail and features necessary to deliver. With dozens of suburbs, a search solution that would protect against cognitive overload was essential. Customised filters and rankings to help users search and discover local events, eateries, and other attractions.
User Experience
The new DYOB site had to strike an appropriate balance between highlighting popular tourist attractions and previewing lesser-known events and activities that correspond with key interest categories (e.g., food and wine, music, sports, etc.).
Through user research and prototype testing, we arrived at a UX design that got users excited about a staycation in Melbourne and inspires exploration and discovery. Not only could they easily find information about events across the whole of Greater Melbourne with our powerful search functionality, we also designed a flyout menu that made discovering suburb or region-specific events intuitive and easy. Where information on the homepage is understandably broad in nature, each suburb and region landing page has a considered flow of information that moves the user through what is on offer without overwhelming them with details.
Project Marketing
For DYOB to remain competitive against similar services and individual travel and tourism operator sites, it was essential the site had top of the line content and search functionalities. The client also engaged us for advanced tracking and SEO to improve its visibility against relevant search terms. For example, there is opportunity within DYOB’s ‘Stories’ section to utilise keyword optimisation and smart URLs to drive traffic and gain traction.
To complement these efforts, our team is actively overseeing a four-month ‘Love Thy Neighbourhood’ search engine marketing campaign to drive traffic to the DYOB homepage (via Google AdWords) and to designated suburb pages (via Facebook and Instagram adverts). The former caters to in-market users performing informational searches (e.g., “Best live music venues Melbourne”), and the latter is hyper-targeted to Melburnians in designated suburbs under the city’s 14 councils.
Project Privacy
Standard privacy procedure was followed in accordance with best practice on all contact forms and other areas of the website where personally identifiable data was collected. In addition we ensure that no personal information is passed through Google Analytics (eg. email addresses). Regular penetration testing is conducted to ensure the site and server are secure. The website, hosting and infrastructure pass this testing with no significant issues identified.
Digital - TravelTech
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