Website re-design for international literary festival
Background
kollektiv sprachwechsel: Literature in Second Language (KS) is a Vienna-based non-profit organisation that brings together authors who write in German as a second or third language. The literary group is organising discussions and readings in Vienna and beyond and has issued a publication dedicated to writing in second language.
Challenge
In 2021, KS organised a unique literary festival in Vienna that took place over a period of two months and included various events in a hybrid format.
KS needed to give the new literary festival an online presence in a way that was not perceived as a separate entity from the organisation and was easy to manage. It needed branding, user friendliness, bilingual feature (German and English), and responsiveness.
Business Goals
Generate participation in the festival’s activities by increasing the number of registrations via the website.
Increase the number of subscribers to the KS newsletter via the registration forms.
Solution
I re-designed the existing KS website and included a section for the literary festival. Subsections were created for a better user experience and easiness to get the information. I also designed and created bilingual copy (English and German) for the registrations forms to various events in the festival.
The registration forms had a tripple function:
to have a clear overview on the number of participants for each event.
to send participants details and reminders about the events they registered for (E-mail marketing automation).
to create a newsletter subscribers’ data base for future KS news via an opt-in function.
UX Techniques
Competitive/Comparative Analysis
Site Map
Sketching and Wireframes
User Journey Map
Usability Testing
Google Analytics
My role
I was part of a small team and worked together with the project manager, artistic programmer, web developer and production manager in a hybrid format.
My role:
UX designer & writer
Graphic designer
Marketing communications strategy and implementation.
Social media: strategy; content creation and distribution (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram -account created from scratch).
UX Design & Copy for e-mail marketing automation campaigns.
Communication with media partners.
Moderation of discussions with international authors.
Evaluation Report
My Process
Discover Phase
I conducted remote interviews with the stakeholders (project manager, production manager, web developer, artistic programmer) to discuss how will the design help the users, what were the business goals and (technical) limitations that needed to be overcome.
Website audit
I analysed the existing KS’s website to determine how to best incorporate the upcoming literary festival and what can be improved to address both business and user needs.
I found out that:
call to action buttons were missing.
the content needed restructuring. For example, the homepage didn’t include a teaser about the latest KS project(s).
monolingual website (only in German).
the navigation menu needed to be improved.
Competitive/
Comparative Analysis
To gain inspiration and identify best practices for the KS website redesign, I conducted a competitor analysis. I began by looking at the websites of several other literary festivals including Hay Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival, and Read My World.
One common feature I identified across these websites was the placement of the registration button in order to emphasise it as the main call to action. This was an important design pattern to consider in order to make it easier and more efficient for users to register for various events.
Another common design pattern I observed was that each festival prominently displayed their upcoming important project at the beginning of their homepage and through a call to action button users would be redirected to specific pages with more detailed information.
Design
KS uses a WordPress template and does not have a full time developer on their team. Therefore, it was not useful to create an entire new template without having the resources and expertise to apply it.
As a result, my redesign utilised the features, characteristics, typography, etc. that are built-in with the template so that the team will not need to exert a significant amount of additional time and energy into learning how to update/edit the website.
The design for the literary festival section was aligned to the initial design of the KS website. I kept the same colours and alternated them in the various visuals. I used a combination of the already existing KS typography (Love Story Rough) and new one (Cabin Regular) for a better visibility. I also incorporated an element that was specifically designed for the festival: the Gulp it down graphic.
I assigned each event a specific colour of the KS branding colour palette. The registration forms followed this design logic.
Website Page Banners
Sabine Marte_Gulp it down
Information architecture: sitemap
Next, I created the following navigation sitemap of the KS website.
Sketching and wireframes
Once I organised all the research and defined the solution, I began to explore potential designs for the website. I created sketches to better visualise various layouts of the website. I then tested these with 3 participants to validate whether these solutions addressed both the user and business needs.
Next, I created low-fidelity wireframes.
Usability Tests
Using these wireframes, I was able to conduct usability testing with 4 participants. This allowed us to gather some crucial feedback to help us decide what to include in the final experience before jumping into the next iteration of our design.
Overall users had an easy time using the website, we just needed to address a few small issues with glitches in the registration forms and typography on online festival visuals (e.g. website banners) for a better visibility. We completed a few rounds of iterations based on testing and feedback to ensure the wireframes included everything we needed. Once the functionality of our design was finalised, I moved on to create a user journey map and designing the UI.
User Journey Map
In order to visualise the current KS website experience from the user’s perspective, I created a user journey map. My goal was to illustrate potential scenarios where a user might interact with the KS website including the process of getting information about and register for various events in the festival.
UX Design & Writing for
e-mail marketing automation
campaigns
In order to facilitate users’ experience to register to and get more details about the various festival events, I developed and implemented 10 flows for e-mail marketing automation campaigns. For this purpose, I used the MailerLite platform.
Users could subscribe to each festival event via personalised forms in German and English on the KS website that I previously created. Following their registration, the subscribers continued to be updated two days before and on the day of each event with targeted newsletters.
The registration forms also included a consent tick box to receive news about KS future events. I thus created a solid data base of KS newsletter subscribers.
I also created the copy for 10 bilingual registration forms and 21 bilingual e-mail campaigns (English and German) with a clear call to action.
