User-centric and truly ‘national’
After more than a year of my involvement, I’m overjoyed to see the new National Theatre website go-live.
This has been a total joy of a project to product lead since the autumn of 2021, with the amazing team at Substrakt who built it in close collaboration with the brilliant cross-functional team at the National.
So what have we improved for users and what's different?
Truly a theatre for all
The old site was very focussed on the programme at the Southbank. But there is so much the National Theatre does around the country and internationally – not least with their cinema screenings.
You can now see what's on in theatres, cinemas and online easily and at a glance. Except for filtering by dates or events, you can now also filter by your location – or a location you're going to – making it really easy to find something near you.
Users can now easily find cinema screenings or theatre shows near their desired location
User-led Information Architecture
The navigation around the old site was very venue-focused making it hard for users to intuitively find what they were looking for.
We put users at the heart of this navigation – making it easy to find not just the right shows to experience, but also for:
– users with access needs to find the right information fast
– school teachers to find useful resources
– visitors coming to the NT to find places to eat and drink
– people to become members or donate easily.
A takeover menu lays out information clearly, enabling users to easily choose the right ‘What’s On’ path or from 4 options on the right to reveal more sub-options
Accessibility, by design
Simply put, the old site was not very accessible.
We have done several rounds of testing – with more and more refined versions of the site – with users with and without access needs to make the site truly inclusive and screen-reader-friendly, tweaking and improving product features and the content.
Users requiring different access services can navigate to access information and find shows for their specific needs easily.
They can also filter by specific access services on What's On and find the access-friendly performances of all upcoming shows, fast.
Users with access needs can easily locate the access filter in the top right and easily filter the performances right for them
A simple list view of filtered access performances gives screen-readers users all information they need on one screen, to easily decide to book tickets
User-centred design – and content
There was a huge amount of content on the old site, which was not always built with users or clear intent in mind.
We have put users' feedback at the heart of the user experience, and all content decisions. Thanks to the steer from Storythings, all content you see on the site has been a total labour of love built by dedicated cross-functional NT teams.
The goal was to make the site incredibly user-friendly, with the intent to help the users get the right information, at the right time in their user journey across the site.
Education content is now clearly written for particular end-users, for example, secondary schools
User-led content means users can easily identify with the right target group and find the content that’s relevant to them, fast
Optimising onwards
As with all new website projects, a launch is just the start of the journey and I look forward to seeing how the website continues to develop and optimise based on customer feedback, and further accessibility improvements, meticulously and brilliantly recommend by Caspian Turner from Accessible by Design, who audited the site.
Thank you so much to the core NT team Nicholas Triantafyllou, Christopher Jones, Alex Bayley, Sara Bakhaty and the tour de force project manager Carmel Hayes – it has been an honour to work with you and I'm so proud of what we've built together.
And of course, a particular thanks and love to the excellent team at Substrakt who brought me into the team as a freelance product lead – James Braithwaite, Ben Doyle, Balteg Singh, Rosie Field, Zosia Poulter, Katie Moffat and Ash Mann, who have truly done their best work.
I can’t recommend working with them enough.