Tourism Tasmania

The opportunity: To present Tasmanian tourism-related stakeholders with a new contemporary corporate site, providing them with sought-after industry research and information. This information helps them grow their businesses, and engages their customers, which leads to achieving their main business goal: marketing the state and getting as many people to Tasmania as possible.

The challenge: Tourism Tasmania’s corporate site hadn’t been updated – from a UX and design perspective – since 2009. Their content needs had dramatically changed, and they were after a new, modern environment to house static content such as: marketing campaigns, industry research, destination news, government media releases and tourism-related announcements. They wanted to capture the unpretentious, sometimes quirky, essence of Tasmania through look and feel, and lastly they wanted to redirect tourist-related visitors to their sub-site discovertasmania.com.au, to relieve the amount of enquires coming in.

The approach:

1. The main stakeholder and decision-maker was particularly interested in capturing good design trends and best practices, and wanted to see a variety of approaches that could work for their requirements.
2. We held a discovery workshop where we explored competitor sites, design trends and techniques, and conducted an in-depth review of colour combinations and imagery.
3. We sketched out various layouts, using primarily card-based design that would give the client maximum flexibility in content creation, while providing a modern interface.
4. From there, we mocked up greyscale concepts and iterated until we struck the right balance between flexibility and good design contrast, amongst the card-based modules.
5. We brought the client along every step of the process, to allow for maximum visibility on our design decisions.

Features based on user research:

• Clean and contemporary site structure that allows for static and traditional content to be more engaging.
• Creation of numerous functional elements to allow content to be housed in a variety of ways, and help reduce stagnant text formatting.
• Site that is compliant with WCAG Guidelines at a AA level.

The outcome:

The client was thrilled with the flexibility available for content authoring and creation. The creative direction we took was a success – it was still in line with their popular Discover Tasmania site – but catered mainly to their key audience, the tourism industry.