This is LEEDS 2023, ONLINE.
We are mid-way through LEEDS 2023*, Year of Culture and it’s been about 10 months since LEEDS 2023 ONLINE went live.
I am sharing our story now because the team and I think it’s the right thing to do, to be open and honest about what and who it’s taken to get us here. Perhaps there will be nuggets that will help other people, perhaps we might make new connections with folks reading it.
Consider this an introduction, a peek behind the curtain backstage at LEEDS 2023 ONLINE, with more to come. So if this is or isn’t helpful, we’d love to know.
*LEEDS 2023 is an independent Year of Culture outside any official framework. It’s a collaborative, collective movement enabling a year-long calendar of events and activities across the city. We’re a charity here for social good.
So, six months in, six months out…this is a snapshot of some things you might find interesting.
1. Avengers Assemble — bringing together talent early without a rigid plan
I was asked to support the Year of Culture by overseeing the digital and design function, injecting new ways of thinking about audiences, and designing for their needs to work towards our mission (To deliver a year of creative experiences which connect people and change their relationship with culture for good.)
If experience has proven anything, it’s that you need good people around, so that’s how it started.
Hosting (alongside Tim Brazier) some cross-team workshops to establish broad thinking on who our user types might be and what they might want from us, we were able to spot some patterns to take into briefs.
On the back of that work, with only a year until 2023’s programme was due to kick-off, I assembled talent to get us to a Minimum Viable, but lovable Product by the summer of 2022. This was important as some user types were already interacting with us and that was gathering pace.
I didn’t go out with a lengthy digital strategy but a solid set of design principles and the message ‘help us to understand the potential barriers to audiences engaging with LEEDS 2023, and what users need from us to get onboard’. I put a light in the sky and asked people to come and work this out with us.
These are the folks (I call them the Avengers!) who’ve rallied around us, and they are fabulous.
- Amy Schofield — copywriter
- Content Design London — content design
- Creode — creative and UX copywriting
- DXW — discovery, leading on user research and experience principles
- Gareth Ellis-Thomas — data and systems architecture
- Good CRM — CRM supplier
- i2 Media Research — immersive experience user research
- Liam Bush — creative copywriter
- Lucky Duck — development and product team (UX, UI & dev)
- Mary Gallagher — CRM project management
- Nexer — accessibility audit and principles
- Open Innovations — data partner, creating an open data dashboard
- Rob Gethen Smith — CRM and operating model support
- Tim Brazier at Thrive by Design — facilitator and designer
2. Design principles — something to guide our work and culture
As part of the ‘light in the sky; I co-created our design principles to include in briefs, to provide a compass and to start creating the culture in which we’d operate.
I also started regular show & tells (short presentations with Q&A to talk about the work), inviting everyone across the org to hear about the approach and progress.
3. Understanding our users — getting to grips with the barriers people face, their motivations and pain-points
Understanding people is my favourite thing! With DXW taking the lead we spoke to people in focus groups over the phone and in the streets and markets of Leeds, asking them what their expectations of LEEDS 2023 might be, what would attract them, what would discourage them and what they needed from an experience leading up to an event or activity. This work was insightful and vital for our strategic objective of engaging people who might face barriers to participation or feel that culture ‘isn’t for them’.
Using the insights, DXW developed 6 personas and 5 experience principles that led to us getting some solid foundations in our early designs.
- We made sure that the site provided key information and gave as much context as possible around experiences, this was prioritised over having a rich media heavy site
- Some people would be turned off by something that looked too ‘high end’ and wanted to navigate around what was on offer quickly and easily without being swept up in carousels of video content
- Many things could put people off, such as a lack of accessibility information, a feeling that they wouldn’t have the right clothes to wear or not knowing when breaks would be
- Clear language and accessible imagery should communicate the ‘feel of the experience’
- Transport and food and drink options were also things many people wanted to understand in detail before committing to attending
You can read more about this work here, and see examples of the personas and principles here.
Running parallel to this, was some fantastic research with i2 Media, which was the foundation for what became our culture map. I2 Media’s research found that people prioritise phone experiences but are nervous about excessive data use or the need for the latest handsets or operating systems, they also found that people preferred digital experiences to add value to the physical, like an ‘extra’ experience.
4. Launching our Minimum Viable (and loveable) Product and our found passion for forms
Late summer 2022, we didn’t yet have a programme to ‘sell’, but we did have users who were keen to find out more about LEEDS 2023 and get involved.
We needed to launch the MVP way ahead of 2023, to give us a chance to get to know the new technical architecture and to continue the hard work with Lucky Duck on ‘what’s on’, which would become the primary journey for most users during 2023.
- We prioritised translating the ‘letting culture loose’ brand online, creating a UI that felt reflective of that vibrancy and developing accessible designs that didn’t feel too out of reach for audiences for whom culture felt new
- We developed editorial content types and pages that could guide users through the context and background of what LEEDS 2023 is and our aspirations for the year
- We also developed an accessible approach to the menu and navigation that could expand in the future
- To ensure seamless performance from launch, we implemented NextJS and AWS server-less Lambda architecture with Vercel, providing a responsive platform that can effortlessly handle the anticipated demands
- We practised forms! — see below
At the time we were collecting lots of information from artists and people supporting the development of the programme, so we developed our famous form! A lot of time and energy went into our ‘form builder’ and it’s become the backbone of many of our interactions. We kept improving it, making it as clear, accessible and secure as we could as the different use cases for it became more apparent. We also developed an in-house interface (using Retool) to view the data coming in, that was user-friendly for all teams. Working on this during 2022 was a really good shout, as it meant the heavy lifting was done before the delivery year, which started with a bang… I will talk about designing ‘the Awakening ballot’ in the next blog!
4. Now THIS is LEEDS 2023 ONLINE — Meet the team
I often get asked about the shape of the XD team, so here we are.
Whilst working with the Avengers, I got stuck in getting some smashing talent to complement the external team and give us the capacity and culture in-house to iteratively improve our product. And, what a bunch they are. Some joined soon after MVP, some joined only a few months ago…but now they’re here and they’re troopers and this is my little love letter to them all.
Experience Design
- Jennifer Donald
Jen brilliantly oversees usability testing and end-to-end design. She is close to our user needs and champions insights when we’re coming up with ideas. She is also an ace communicator and applies her design skills to that space, so our audiences have experiences that all join up.
Product Management
Christie, Joel and Lauren manage our core platform and how it’s functioning for users and our organisation’s objectives.
Joel has heaps of experience in arts and culture and is a fabulous unicorn, he whips up prototypes for us to work around, advises on tech specifications and builds tools for our stack too.
Christie has lots of experience in social change, festivals and tech start-ups, and is extremely disciplined with documentation, taking ownership of vital artefacts like our ROPA and our approach to User Acceptance Criteria (UAT).
Together, Joel and Christie prioritise and manage our backlog and plan our sprints of development work, using frameworks to assess the value v the impact of each item.
Lauren brings a brilliant passion and a range of experience. She owns the product day to day, she makes things better on an ongoing basis, troubleshooting issues and working in partnership with folks across LEEDS 2023.
Delivery Management
Never would I ever…build a team without delivery folks in/around it. They are superb. I’ve introduced Delivery Management into a few teams now, and it just changes the game. People who help get stuff to delivery. What’s not to love?
Fiona and Richa are a dynamic duo, they have their ears to the ground on everything that’s happening across LEEDS 2023 and boot away blockers beautifully. They work tirelessly to make things work well and bring agility to the team.
If you’re trying to implement more digital ways of working, hire delivery people as a starting point, you won’t regret it.
Ticketing Services
Cath and Ollie own LEEDS 2023 ticketing. They hold all the ticketing details of every event in our programme and collaborate with colleagues to design what those ticketing journeys and models look like. They are super-users of our ticketing software Ticket Tailor and they often meet and greet our audiences on-site too. What superstars!
I am extremely lucky to work with this team; bringing them together is my biggest achievement in LEEDS 2023. We work in a very flat, collaborative and open way, it’s our team, we co-own it and we each take responsibility for how it’s working and our impact.
We’re not here to build a website, we’re here to make a difference.
6. Finally…How’s it all going? Check out our data
Together with Open Innovations, we’ve published our data. This has been live for a year, and like most of our things it’s still a work in progress, we chip away at making it better all the time. We use this dashboard to ‘show as we go’. There is no big reveal, we are being open and transparent (following our design principles!) about our impact.
This approach reduces reporting and allows other people to use the data in a way that helps them.
We plan to publish more data, code and tools as we head towards the end of the year.
That’s a lot for an introduction, but a lot has happened and writing this, I feel proud. There is so much more to share about what we’ve done and plan to do. I hope that this has been interesting, or useful. I’d love to hear feedback and ideas about what else you’d like us to share.
Ohh and check out our programme and come to some stuff, please :)
