Project Overview
ASA Cultural Tours provide exceptional tours across 45 countries worldwide. Our vision was to build a new website with a timeless and elegant interface, facilitating universal ease-of-use.
The result was a vibrant and engaging fully responsive website that acts as a hub for cultural tour information. The site delivers value to the user through a comprehensive wealth of resources, easy-to-navigate information, and content with sophisticated filter controls.
Importantly, we delivered to the brief and provided an easy-to-use website for ASA, utilising sophisticated content management tools that streamline publishing, delivery and dynamic content. The site has dramatically increased traffic and engagement.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Design: Warren Everard, Mack Nevill
Development: David Pike, Mark Seddon
Project Management: Catherine Young
Digital Strategy: Corey Thompson
Project Brief
For 38 years ASA Cultural Tours (ASA) has provided a growing collection of cultural tours ranging from 10 days to 3 weeks, across 45 countries worldwide. With a dedicated and passionate team of permanent and international staff, ASA offer a myriad of cultural tours focusing on a raft of topics, ranging from architectural to garden, history through to literature.
With an old website that no longer met the needs of the organisation, Evolution 7 was engaged to deliver a website that just as easy to navigate for CMS admins as it was for the users. We streamlined ASA’s publishing process by implementing a sophisticated content management tool that delivered dynamic content across the site.
The resulting website is a vibrant and engaging fully responsive website that acts as a hub for information on upcoming cultural tours, events, lecturers and tour leaders. The user is instantly charmed with prominent and emotive visuals, capturing the essence of the tours provided by ASA.
Project Innovation/Need
With a loyal and highly-engaged customer base and an older target demographic, the website needed to be engaging and easy to use but also provide users access to a wealth of content, imagery, maps, detailed itineraries and much more. Navigational tools and clever arrangement of content allows the user to browse and explore tours, or to delve into the detail, as they chose and with minimal cognitive load.
ASA Tours provide a range of tours by a number of highly-respected subject experts and academics in their field, and customer research revealed that returning customers were focused on the tour leaders. This informed our decision to highlight the tour leader on the trip, as well as providing the user tools to search and view all tours delivered by a specific leader.
We also identified that tablet use by the target audience was on the rise and thus ensured that not only was the website fully responsive to any device, but that the display and organisation of content on tablet was well-considered.
Built on WordPress with further enhancements and customisation, we streamlined the publishing process with an intuitive and easy to use CMS.
Design Challenge
The primary design challenge was providing an engaging and intuitive structure to the website content and the comprehensive wealth of resources and tour information, allowing users to easily browse available tours and explore individual tours in more detail.
The heart of the website is the numerous tours offered to locations around the world. With 60-80 tours being available to book at any time, sophisticated category and filter controls to the tour search interface allows the user to narrow down the options to those of most interest/relevance to them. The ‘Quick View’ within the the listing allows for a quick peek before clicking through to the tour.
User research indicated there were different browsing preferences within the user base - those who preferred more visual grid view, and those who preferred a list. We designed both layouts and made the controls available for users to chose the display that suits them best.
Within each tour, internal page navigation allows for the management and measured revelation of content, allowing users to skim or explore content as suits their stage of the research and decision making process.
User Experience
With a loyal and committed returning customer base, the biggest test of the new website’s experience was the reception it received from those users. Pleasingly, within the first month of the site launch, traffic and engagement levels rose significantly, and both customers and staff alike are delighted with the new site.
The online presence delivered has clearly communicated ASA’s expertise and reflects their reputation as a considered, engaged, and relevant authority in cultural tours.
The most rewarding results came from providing a platform for ASA Tours that facilitates their customers in finding and joining a cultural tour, to learn about places they have always longed to visit and to get a fresh vision of the world.
As Marcel Proust said “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
Digital Experience - Website - Product
This award celebrates innovation and creativity in design of a unique user experience in the combination of text, audio, still images, animation, video, and interactivity content for websites. Consideration given to clarity of communication and the matching information style to audience.
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