2012 New Zealand International Arts Festival

The Festival website needed to drive ticket sales and make it easy for users to share their picks.

This year the focus was on the mobile site, refining the user experience to highlight what’s important, and remove what’s not. We added wow where it didn’t restrict the user experience, and embraced the same philosophy of simplicity as demonstrated on the full site.

Somewhat liberated from the slow connection speeds of Festival’s past, 2012 gave us the opportunity to embrace the strong event imagery, and introduce video to better inform, seduce and entertain our users. It’s all about the events – we wanted to limit superfluous content and distractions so the events could take centre stage.

We made sure the essential event data was clear and at hand on the listing pages, to assist the user’s decision-making with minimum effort and navigation. The site statistics suggest we have achieved this aim, with most users adding events to their shortlist from the listing page. With ticket sales a primary desired outcome, we focused on streamlining the ticket purchasing process as much as possible with our limited influence on the Ticketek system. The Shortlist allows uncomplicated planning and sharing of a user’s very own Festival programme.