Background

Melbourne & Olympic Parks (M&OP) hosts millions of guests each year, who come to attend one of the hundreds of sporting, entertainment and conference events held in the precinct.

M&OP’s six websites needed to be redeveloped to cater for their evolved needs – including improving the digital guest experience, and making website content updates more efficient.

Tension

How can we add value to digital guests and help M&OP create exceptional and memorable experiences, when we have no involvement in the events themselves and the ticket purchase happens elsewhere?

Approach

The project involved designing, building, and launching 6 new websites within 6 months, which meant we needed to make the right decisions regarding the technology and design approach, and then manage the project very tightly.

We started by learning about the users through undertaking interviews with event attendees and event managers, which we used to build our personas. At the same time we engaged with the business stakeholders to understand M&OP’s requirements, with particular importance placed on the needs of the content authors.

From there we were able to determine the desired user flows and authoring experience, which in turn helped us to map out our desired information architecture.

This enabled us to agree the technical set-up and development approach, so that while we created a single design system for the 6 websites and designed each of the components and page templates, we could also get started on setting up the back-end infrastructure and the technical environment.

We created the design across a series of UX and UI Sprints. Some of the important aspects of the design included:

• Creating more detailed Event pages to give guests the information they needed to fully plan their event and to get into the event during the lead up;
• Simplifying functional content including how to plan your visit, get to the precinct, where to park, and precinct accessibility information;
• Increasing the prominence of tenant clubs, and making it easier to find their full fixture list; and
• Visually making the site far easier to navigate and scan for content.

We build the sites using a multi-site implementation of WP Engine, which made it each to share the design system across the sites, while applying a different visual identity for each site, and tweaking the designs to meet the specific needs of each stadium.

The WP Engine hosting environment delivered high uptime and high levels of security, and we’ve designed the authoring environment to be efficient and easy to use.

Impact

The new sites were all launched in December 2021 in the lead up to the 2022 Australian Open. The sites performed well immediately, with the architecture and authoring environment making editing the websites and managing content significantly easier and more efficient.

When compared to the period immediately preceding the launch, the new websites saw increases in traffic, clicks to buy tickets & key engagement metrics (e.g. video play, plan your event – getting here & maps). At the same time there was a reduction in links out to transport (due to improved maps and on-site functionality), clicks to contact us and bounce rate.