Building a symphony orchestra’s website roadmap
Business Challenge: The Waterbury Symphony Orchestra’s website was clunky and visually chaotic so patrons learned not to use it. When a new Marketing Director was hired, she made preliminary updates, but needed help figuring out how to make the site user friendly and professional so she could start regaining patrons’ trust and increase online engagement.
Solution: Perform a heuristic markup of the website, develop a prioritization strategy to elevate the user experience in the short term, and provide tools to create organizational buy-in on larger changes required to meet both user and business goals.
My Role: I partnered with the Marketing Director to scope the work, but was responsible for all aspects of execution.
“Alison is a true professional. She started by asking great questions and then she really listened. Her website audit was thorough and detailed. She presented it in a way that is organized and easy to understand. She even went an extra step and created explanation slides to give the "why" behind her recommendations. Our entire team was impressed by the quality of her work. Alison is a rock star!”
— Waterbury Symphony Orchestra’s Marketing Director
User & Business Goal Definition
- Convey the music, education and community aspects of the brand.
- Move users up the engagement funnel, prioritizing their ability to buy tickets, buy subscriptions, make a donation, become part of the community and opt in to be a brand ambassador.
In absence of being able to speak with users, I hypothesized that the user goals would be to:
- Find concert details (time, location, etc)
- Buy tickets to a show
- Learn about upcoming shows
- Learn about the organization
- Make a donation
Heuristic Markup
I evaluated the site page-by-page on both the desktop and mobile experiences, marking places that didn't follow UX or design best practices.
Additionally, I evaluated ease of use of both the user and business goals and noted barriers to accomplishing them.
Strategy Development
Based on my evaluation of the site I documented and catalogued each of the observations, assigning each a classification and priority along with a recommendation for how to address the issue. Prioritization was assigned based on severity of the issue and level of effort to address it.
This rolled up into an overall strategy allowing the team to tackle the quick wins and biggest barriers to usage while working towards a site that would more closely align with their organizational goals.
Personalized Design Best Practices
The team also wanted to learn some design best practices so they could be self sufficient when updating the site over time. For each of the classifications I provided illustrative examples to showcase how the current site was falling down as well as best practice tips and resources to address the common errors.
Wireframe & Mockup
While redesigns were out of scope for this project, I later created the following wireframe and mockup to visualize the homepage recommendations:
