Project Overview
As Australia's premier event for innovators, creatives and tech heads, Pause lives under a microscope. If Pause doesn’t have the look and feel of an ultra-cool industry thought leader it loses on ticket sales.
This scrutiny is felt most keenly at Pause’s primary point of conversion, their website, which is why they came to Butterfly for a new one.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Project Brief
As a festival about innovation, Pause has to be a shark, always moving, always evolving and accelerating beyond the pace of ordinary change. So, almost every year they redesign their website, and in 2017 they also decided to redefine their brand.
Butterfly would build Pause Fest’s high stakes hub for content, ticketing and scheduling. It would align with an evolving brand personality and repositioning. It would be responsive with outstanding UX and it had to be delivered in just a few weeks.
The website statistics speak for themselves, particularly when compared to the previous year:
- Page views up 20.45% from the previous year
- Average session time is up 24.73% from the previous year
- 85.11% increase in acquisitions from organic search results
Project Innovation/Need
Butterfly actively implemented features to keep users on-site by making their lives easy. We implemented an awesome calendar and scheduling plugin, Blokks, which allows users to browse event details and speaker information without navigating away from the schedule page. It has been a massive win for Pause.
To top it off, Butterfly built the ticketing plugin, Tito, into the site. This has been a key feature for Pause, who had been using third party ticketing companies to sell tickets. These often have clunky purchasing systems taking users off-site.
Tito is a pop-up that allows tickets to be purchased quickly on-site and helps reduce the number of abandoned carts.
The most apparent is the inclusion of a countdown timer, which gives the user a sense of urgency when browsing. There are also several buttons on the first section of homepage that will take you to the ticketing screen, and an intercom pop-up, which means a users questions can be answered immediately.
Design Challenge
Pause has become a more exclusive event, which focused our design choices around a few key elements drawing the user towards purchasing from a limited ticket pool. The hard part is to include all of the features without muddling the message or inundating the user with information. So, Butterfly focused on keeping the website simple, inspiring and easy-to-use with the minimalist design giving the site’s content the space to speak for itself.
The colour pallette came from existing marketing collateral for 2018’s Pause Fest on the theme Journey=Destination. We did a little tweaking to ensure it met rigorous contrast standards for maximum usability. The collateral also gave us the iconic valley and mountain silhouette, which speaks to journey, destination, and if you look a little deeper, how that plays into the human struggle between necessity and innovation.
User Experience
What really makes this site hum is the UX. It’s crisp. This is in part thanks to super fast load times brought about by clean code, the use of SVGs and thorough testing.
The clean code is a result of building the site’s template from the ground up, which gives us full control of the code’s structure. There are no loose pieces of code that go nowhere, which you often get with templates. Templates can be good for speedy design, but for us there’s little benefit because we still build fast with our own CSS framework for front-end development, which accelerates our builds and, crucially maintains quality.
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG’s) are a beautiful thing. They are what helps us make logos, icons and illustrations look amazingly sharp no matter the screen resolution. They also have the benefit of having super small file sizes, which can drastically reduce load times.
Butterfly created a website where users can have frictionless experiences across all devices, whether they were on a desktop, tablet or smartphone. We made the fonts strong, the type bold and the colour contrast stark.
Digital - Corporate
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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