Historical Royal Palaces
The brief
To Optimise User Paths to Purchase
Historic Royal Palaces is an independent charity that manages the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, the Banqueting House at Whitehall, Kensington Palace, Kew Palace, and Hillsborough Castle. As a digital partner, Great State was tasked with monitoring and proactively responding to functionality issues and with the continued optimisation of the site.
This project built upon the findings of a separate usability study to evaluate the effectiveness of the existing site's navigation structure, specifically assessing whether the current navigation facilitated users in finding key content, booking tickets, and signing up as members.
What we did
Evaluating the Experience, Together
The project began with a workshop at the Tower of London with the wider HRP digital team. During this session, we reviewed a recent testing report and identified the site's navigation issues, goals, and priorities together.
We conducted several further workshops to align on both user and stakeholder needs. For instance, in one exercise, we began by everyone noting down the main issues with booking and mobile navigation individually.
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What we did
Light-weight Affinity Mapping
We grouped these issues by themes for a detailed discussion, which helped us understand the core problems, and unpack the why's behind these issues. This exercise helped us set the following goals to enhance the site's navigation:
- Promoting other palaces
- Informing users about their location and possible next steps
- Highlighting events and boosting conversions
- Using 'digital nudges' to encourage site visits
- Advertising private venue hire
- Promoting membership benefits to increase online sign-ups
The outcome
Visualising Simple Design Amendments in the Browser
Most of the UX improvements involved discrete design changes, such as removing, reorganising, and reordering content. Therefore, to save time, instead of visualising these changes through design Sketch designs, I used the inspect tool in Chrome to make changes directly to the HTML in the browser, and shared changes as CodePen links.
Reflections
Other projects
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