Watermans Arts

Watermans is an multi-discipline arts centre in the Brentford neighbourhood of London. They offer a wide range of creative experiences to enjoy and participate in, from live performance, cinema, installation and children’s activities.

THE CONTEXT & OBJECTIVES

Being a non-profit, Watermans had a modest to upgrade and rebrand their website – the site was in sore need of an overhaul from UX perspective, as the site was not responsive and too many pieces of content required too many clicks to access, as well being very visually outdated. They had just rebranded the space and needed that colour, energy and modernisation to reflect in their online assets.

For Watermans, their key objectives for this website overhaul included:

1. Design the website within a responsive framework, as data was showing increased traffic from mobile devices
2. Update the IA – Re-organise and optimise content structure to be more intuitive / follow best UX practice
3. Apply the new brand to the site while also bringing the overall visual look and feel more up to date
4. Ensure the site was at least AA compliant in colour usage, text readability and tags.

PROJECT CHALLENGES

Adapting the offline look and feel to online – trying to make the colour palette and text usage compliant, but still retain the overall visual tone proposed by the brand.
1. Many of the original colour combinations, though intriguing from a visual point of view were not compliant from a colour contrast perspective for online.
2. We ended up using those less compliant colour combos for secondary / non-crucial content while ensure all crucial content within a user journey was definitely compliant.
Working with the third party booking and content system.
1. For all of their events, including shows and cinema, the majority of the content goes through a third party ticketing system that was changing and upgrading their platform at the same time as we were putting together Waterman’s site.
2. The Watermans team had to constantly change user journeys and page structures weekly due to the third party vendor changes. The majority of issues any user encounters on the site has to do with this technical integration…

THE SET UP

My role: Experience Director / Designer (UX & Visual Design)
Client: Watermans
Media / Platform: Responsive website

THE OLD SITE

THE NEW SITE ARCHITECTURE

One of the biggest areas of the architecture to update as around how they categories events within the nagivation. I worked with them closely on constructing a more intuitive structure for both users and organisers. I also improved their donation flows and entry to their cart functionality.

UX, PROTOTYPES AND TESTING

UX Design and UI Design system

UX design and user journeys were done through rough, hand-drawn sketching to start. I consulted and collaborated with clients as those sketches progressed.

UI Designs, design system and prototyping

From there, I created the UI design system as a foundation for the UI and prototypi9ng work to come. The design system was focused on bringing as much of the new Watermans rebrand into the digital space to mirror the onsite experience.

Moving onto the UI design and testing process – I created template page flat designs that were picked up by developers at early states to create code based prototypes; revising, adding and iterating the user experience as the prototypes got built.

Testing the designs

There was no budget to do external user testing. We did guerrilla evaluative testing with staff and some very engaged members on key flows like the events calendar, cart and donation flows.