Case study 1

Visit Scotland

About VisitScotland

"VisitScotland.com is the official consumer website of VisitScotland, Scotland's national tourist board”

"Working closely with private businesses, public agencies and local authorities, they work to ensure that their visitors experience the very best of Scotland and that the country makes the most of its outstanding tourism assets

Summary of the project

The marketing automation programme (MAP) team were going through a number of changes including their technology stack

With my experience in strategy, email marketing, content management systems and graphic design, I was engaged to lead the redesign of their MAP user experience. During my time at VisitScotland I was responsible for leading team alignment workshops, user research & analysis, stakeholder management, empathy mapping, service blueprinting, graphic design systems, email design, and worked as part of the implementation team for their new email marketing system

My role

UX lead consultant

Project timescale

9 months

VisitScotland website

All VisitScotland research was captured using Miro

Personas were important to help the the team humanise the customer journeys

Research Methods used

I wanted to bring the team along on the user experience journey and by valuing their skills and their expertise of the existing services, they helped me conduct a variety of user research sessions

1User research, analysis and synthesis - To understand the users needs and their goals/objectives
2Heuristic analysis of their email campaigns - to better understand their existing models
3Employee interviews - To observe and understand the team dynamics
4Team Alignment workshops - Get everyone to agree the same goals
5Empathy mapping, personas, archetypes and service blueprints for MAP - To create a shared understanding of why their customers use/visit VisitScotland(.org/.co.uk)

Visitscotland emails were fully responsive

The solution

1I spent time bringing their cross functional teams together and facilitating important discussion, helping them to re-align their common agendas and remove their siloed approach to marketing.
2I worked collaboratively with marketing teams, and designers within the team on their content strategy and brand design system. This helped create a consistent approach to visual communication throughout the organisation.(Multi-brand approach)
3Helped facilitate a design workflow to support the teams on their automation strategy and removed bottle necks / unnecessary governance processes. (Building trust within the teams and fostering a growth mindset mentality)
4I also helped inform end to end measures of success through their digital channels. This was based on common goals between their customers, the business, and their content teams

Examples of some of the email templates

Narrative and email marketing guide

Outcomes/Outputs included:

●The narrative for all of their emails were categorised, and adapted based on their users mental models (e.g. first time visitors, current affairs, news, offers and specific tailored content based on the individual needs of the user.)
●Service design blueprint strategically shared with all teams who are affected by the organisational change
●A visual design guide (based on their brand values) was applied to their email marketing platform including branding, type treatment, colour use, accessibility and their content narrative. This was also for third party suppliers to follow
●Email templates were built using accessible HTML and CSS suitable for email modern email clients and most importantly, were inclusive
●Improved customer onboarding journey
●Customers receive a number of tailored emails from the moment they sign up - Measurable effectiveness and customer satisfaction through a variety of connected data touchpoints
●Teams have more autonomy and govern their own work - Measurable internal team satisfaction

Website improvements

Reflection

The MAP project was halted during the covid pandemic due to the impact on tourism globally. The programme has subsequently managed to gain some traction and the teams are now more user centred than ever

They are able to offer consumers a much richer experience, whilst also being able to report their successes back to stakeholders in a measurable way. I would have liked to spent a bit more time on the project honing their usability studies following implementation

I would also have liked to conduct follow up research within the team to understand where further improvements could be made

“Even the best designers produce successful products only if their designs solve the right problems. A wonderful interface to the wrong features will fail.”
- Jakob Neilson