Explore how we approached the content for the new Southbank Centre website.

1. Southbank Centre’s
website project
2015

3. What is Southbank Centre?
It’s the largest single-run arts centre in the world. You can
find it in Waterloo, London.
In 2014 the centre’s digital department was expanded to
build a new website in-house.

4. The new website needed to:
• Sell and explain 5000+ events and 12 festivals every year
• Explain clearly 10+ different ticket types
• Cope with a constantly changing artistic programme and
many last-minute changes
• Be future proof
• Come in under budget.
(phew)

5. Initial concepts

6. The website was built
mobile first.
To help us on our UX journey we did guerrilla testing as well
as more formal lab-based testing.

9. We worked iteratively.
We started by building several festival microsites.
Our learnings were then fed back into the bigger website
project.

10. Women of the World festival
Our first release was the microsite for Southbank Centre’s
Women of the World festival.

11. Festival homepage

12. “A festival of talks, workshops and performances
celebrating women and girls – Women of the World is
now five years old and has become a global
phenomenon. Join us in person and online.”
(Homepage copy)

13. What did we learn?
Lots of things. For instance, the “What ticket do I want?”
page wasn’t working for users.
So we changed the design and copy until the results
improved.

14. Plotting the site architecture...

15. What did I do?
We were a very collaborative team. But here are some of the
things I led on:
● All web content
● Review of the organisation’s tone of voice, including:
○ Rooting out jargon
○ Establishing plain-English rules
● Review of location naming rules (led working group with stakeholders)
● New Content Strategy
● Writing content-related user journeys
I also helped with user testing – including running the user consultation
group (card sorting) and in the usability lab.

16. END