Iterative research for a user-centred Historic Royal Palaces website redesign
In this project, we crafted a user-first website strategy—refining personas, optimising content, and reshaping the visitor journey to boost engagement both online and onsite.
The Challenge
Adopting an audience-first approach in its digital shop front, Historic Royal Palaces (HRP) planned a complete re-launch of its website aiming to:
- Provide user-centred programmes for schools, families and young people
- Boost UK-based audience attendance outside of London
- Leverage on its unique history to further develop film and television media involvement
- Embrace the digital era by updating its onsite and online experiences
The strategy
- Research insight from remote and face-to-face interviews with a mix of customers;
- Content and SEO analysis to understand duplication, information redundancy over the breath of the site and form questions to zoom in on for qualitative research
- Stakeholder ideation session and workshop, as well as multiple stakeholder and steering group presentations to align with internal teams
- Contextual enquiry and onsite observation to understand the real visitor journey when visiting a palace
- Development of 5 key personas that were used to inform all aspects of the design process.
- Card sorting to understand how customers think about categories and information on the website
- We defined an improved information architecture (IA) based on storylines and validation using a tree test
- Design activities: low-fidelity wireframes for mobile and desktop to bring the IA to life and visualise a possible design
- The wireframes were then tested with real users with iterations made to the designs
The result
- We condensed eight original personas into five, helping HRP focus their future redesign activities. Our research-based approach meant that we were able to re-define persona contexts and goals to make them more realistic.
- We identified a number of research-driven opportunities to increase engagement with HRP products and services and implemented these using persuasion techniques in our IA and lo-fidelity wireframes
- Our iterative research provided the HRP digital team with a robust IA that they can build the cutting-edge concept of a storyline will tempt visitors and lead them to explore historic parts of the palace and beyond.
- The contextual research was vital to evaluating and mapping the palace visit experience and its current pitfalls, including the lack of signposting and a restrictive audio guide.
- Frequent stakeholder engagement through workshops and presentations helped our immediate HRP team to gain buy-in from the organisation.