Reimagining broadcasted productions at The National Theatre
Service Design | Journey Mapping | User Research | Design SprintsClient: The National TheatreDeliverable: Service maps, digital prototypes Aims and Objectives
The National Theatre is undergoing a significant digital transformation project to update legacy IT systems and websites. The first part of this transformation project is to look at the NT Live website, which shows visitors which of the National Theatre productions are being screened at a cinema local to them in the UK and worldwide.
The current website is outdated, and the CMS is hard to update for the content editors. From a user’s perspective, navigating and finding information about the performances is hard. There is a longer-term goal to integrate all of the sites and run them from a single headless CMS, and this was to be the first step.
Key Objectives:
Find ways to sell the concept of theatre performances being screened in local cinemas by educating visitors on the website.
Design structured content and modularised components to form the core of the NT Live website and the other websites owned by the National Theatre.
Improve the user journey of the ticket buying process to allow users to buy from the venue website.
Outcomes
The National Theatre as an organisation had little experience with UX. The primary purpose of this project was to redesign the ticket-buying journey and start introducing UX to their development process. Involving the broader team in the process helped sell the idea internally and has led to further discussion about how we can use UX techniques from the outset when redeveloping the rest of the National Theatre digital estate and future projects.
Approach
We gathered the key stakeholders in a workshop to understand organisational goals and refocus their attention on the website users.
Within the workshop, we looked at who the users are by conducting some Empathy Mapping exercises to help flesh out our understanding. We isolated the critical user group and mapped out the complete user journey from the catalyst to buying the ticket to the post-cinema experience to see what it looked like, where the strengths were and where the opportunities lay. Following the User Journey Mapping workshop, we identified the critical parts of the ticket-buying journey that required attention and then set out on a week-long Design Sprint which I facilitated to identify possible solutions.
The Design Sprint began by understanding the problem. We looked at existing market research that had been carried out, Google Analytics and finally, how other cultural organisations presented similar offerings. The following days, they were focused on ideation and refining a potential solution on paper before I took it away to build it into a prototype ready for user testing. I tested the prototype ticket-buying journey with 5 participants.
The results of the testing were a helpful guide for the team. They formed the basis of the central part of the project, which involved disassembling the site's content and redesigning it so that they could start reusing content and components across the other websites in the future.