Glampfest

Hero Banner:

The hero banner was where I wanted to hook our visitors into buying a ticket for the festival and based on feedback and my own opinion decided that a video would be the best way on showing users what the festival is about and I felt that it was definitely an important part of the site for festivalgoers and the business.

Like on many older websites, the old hero banner was just one image of the main festival tent with people inside. This certainly didn’t want me to buy a ticket straightaway however a video that plays as soon as you enter the site might do. I originally looked at adding a carousel instead of a video however when testing this found that it looked a lot like a banner advertisement, which could make it invisible due to ‘banner blindness’.

The new hero banner spanned the majority width of the page and showcased the amazing things on offer at the festival to try and do to entice festivalgoers to buy a ticket.  The video plays as soon as the user enters the page so that it immediately grabs their attention and so that they know what the festival is all about within the first 15 seconds of being on there.

Line Up:

People want to know who will be performing at the festival and when, and this information cannot be presented in the form of a boring list. It is crucial when putting on a festival to build ‘hype’ to increase excitement amongst festival goers to drive ticket sales. Music is one of the easiest things to build this hype and excitement over, as music is one of, if not the most important reason people attend festivals. As a result, visitors expect an interactive and easy-to-read line-up to help build excitement and convince them into purchasing tickets. When designing this page, I realised how important the line-up is to visitors and how we could manipulate this to our advantage as a marketing tool. Festival line-ups and schedules give people a detailed look at how good the event will be. To generate buzz for the festival and the acts, I created punchy, and engaging descriptions for each performer alongside links to their social media and streaming channels.

Once the line-up was released in full, users were able to read about the acts performing at the festival, as well as listen to them on any streaming platform and follow the artists’ social media channels. During my research phase for this project, I discovered how integral and important this information was to the success of the festival, as this gave festival goers the tools to make an informed decision on whether to see an artist and allow them to plan their day in advance.

Food & Drink:

My research showed that a significant portion of potential festival goers were keen to see food and drink offerings at the festival prior to their attendance to help them plan their meals and their day. To aid this, we created a new module that displayed the food and drink vendors that would be in attendance at the festival. Much like the artist line-up, I also included a description of each of the vendors, alongside links to their websites and/or social media platforms. Often at festivals, attendees are not sure about the availability of food on the day nor are they sure if vendors cater to their dietary needs or restrictions. Therefore, I felt that it was important to add menu features for each vendor, to minimise stress and confusion for attendees that had dietary restrictions prior to the event.

What's On:

For the ‘What’s On’ section of the website, I felt that it was important to create a page that described the festival in full and highlight the unique selling points of this festival compared to others. This page was created with the purpose of setting the tone for users and providing them with an idea of our mission, vision, and values, which is a fun, family-friendly festival with a feel good atmosphere. Furthermore, the page demonstrated that there was more to the festival than just good music and that there was something to cater to everyone in the family. After speaking with clients, and researching competitors in the market, they determined that the best way to present this information was in a timetable format. This allowed users to learn more about the festival, as well as the timings of each individual activity, what they consisted of, and where they were located on the festival site. I was initially against this idea, but after designing a prototype and then putting this into action, users came back with resounding feedback about the design and the clarity it provided for visitors whilst giving them an insight into activities on offer.”

Buy Tickets:

Based on analytics and talking to customers, it was clear that most people who visited the Glampfest website wanted to find more about the festival and book tickets, so it was important that we made this as easy as possible. On the old website, there was a button at the top of the page that took you to an external website which created friction for some users as they were unsure it was a legitimate link.

Because of this, I created a new page that allowed customers to buy a ticket for the festival without being diverted to another website.

When designing the page, I kept all existing form fields that were on the external website but visually simplified the form by highlighting the main input fields. We optimised the form for the most common use case – an adult weekend camping ticket. I usually prefer to use vertically stacked forms as they’re generally more efficient to fill out, but a horizontal arrangement fitted better on this page layout and tested quite well.

Ready to Hit The Stage:

Once we were happy with the new design above, we A/B tested it against the old one on a small portion of our user base. Much to our delight, the new design worked wonders, performing better than the old one in key areas. While the limited technical scope did narrow our design options, it was a fun and challenging project to work on. I think it demonstrates how purely visual design changes can have a significant impact on the user experience and conversion rate of a website.