Claudelands

Project background

Claudelands is a unique one-site, multi-zoned events facility located in the heart of Hamilton City. The facility is a modern solution for live music, performance, sport, conferencing, meetings, banquet dinners and indoor or outdoor exhibitions.

Lots of change over the past 5 years and their website now needed to evolved and accommodate two core user groups.

We had already built a great relationship with Claudelands over the past 5 years and the website now needed to evolve and be better targeted at their key audiences.

The Workshop

I arranged a meeting with Claudelands with the agenda being to understand their on the users of their website. We evaluated the user experience of their current experience and started listing down ways that this could be improved.

Key objectives were to examine the existing website content for usefulness and redundancy, establish a working site map, determine the target audience and identify the key user personas.

Exploration of key user journeys

Working closely with their marketing team we worked on identifying four key personas for each area and figure out how their needs differed. Having these personas helped our design decisions when it came to initial wireframing and user journey exploration.

A sitemap was established from the user persona research and client feedback. I evolved this into a visual flow diagram to give a clear idea the several paths a user could go down. This was accompanied with some low fidelity wireframing to illustrate what page had prominent call to actions.

High fidelity wireframing

As user journeys became established I started to dive deeper into the page structure and establish grid systems. Typography was also introduced so visual hierarchy could start to occur with the page elements.

Visual design

Once we had received some initial user and client feedback from the wireframes I made the necessary refinements and seeked further approval before I moved on with visual design. The Claudelands brand identity is minimal in design so the colour palate was kept very neutral across the site so the emphasis could be on the beautiful photography of the different events and spaces. This fitted appropriately with the brand style guide we received earlier on in the project.