ss Great Britain Trust, the leading heritage charity that cares for Brunel’s famous ship, chose Sift Digital to aid in overhauling its digital strategy. The first major success of the plan is the launch of a new website, providing a platform for future digital innovation.
Project outline
The new ss Great Britain website is the beginning of an ambitious digital strategy that will seek to reflect visitors’ offline experience of the ship and its history online, as well as communicate the story of the ship and its associated historical characters through digital media.
ss Great Britain chose to work with us because of our skill and expertise in user centred design: simply, putting the audience at the heart of the process.
Nick Torday, Head of Charities, Arts & Heritage commented:
“To bring a national treasure such as the ss Great Britain to life through digital innovation is an incredible opportunity for Sift Digital. The physical experience of walking around the ship and the museum is deeply immersive and engaging; we have to ensure that the digital experience reflects that and inspires even more visitors to come and connect with the broad offering they have here.”
The user centred design approach
We kicked off the project with extensive stakeholder research, gaining detailed feedback from online and offline supporters to feed into the new site’s development.
The research involved 149 Brunel’s ss Great Britain web site visitors who had volunteered to take part. The age range and demographic spread of the respondents was large and broadly representative of the visitors who come to Brunel’s ss Great Britain and use the website.
Key findings from the ss Great Britain Trust’s focus groups included:
- Educational activities and resources were considered to be an important part of the site.
- The site needs to make it easy to donate to, or support, Brunel’s ss Great Britain.
- Information on planning a visit, including special events, should be easy to find
From these findings, and through a number of related exercises, the site structure and importance of specific areas to the core users were defined. The website is designed to showcase Brunel’s ss Great Britain and Brunel Institute, its educational and fundraising programmes and its venue hire and weddings business as well as integrate the ss Great Britain Trust’s social media channels.
The results
The website’s innovative and striking design has been received positively by the general public and the press, including Creative Boom and The Guardian.