MAMAWe are art.
Cursor & colour transitions, SVG hero text overlays, API-driven event calendar for topical content and integrated eComm & ticketing for Australia’s most daring regional art museum.
OVERVIEW
The Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) is a regional Australian modern art gallery with big ambitions. Their business objectives of increasing visitation and paid involvement with gallery programs needed to be realised through their new digital platform - handling all visitor info as well as transactions.
SCOPE
User experienceUI designFullstack development
RECOGNITION
Awwwards SOTD Winner - April 2022
Webby Awards - Norminated - Best Site Structure & Navigation
Challenge
To encourage visitation and compel people to make the trip to this regional destination, the site needed to convey the breadth of experiences on offer at MAMA, and facilitate easy transactions - for both the user and the gallery.
With a vision to create a visually rich and contextually relevant online tool, we needed to understand the key user groups, break down their needs, and create an IA that allowed for multiple user needs. The core UX challenges were to increase conversions - across event ticket purchase, enrollments in MAMA Studio workshops and classes, and travel packages to Albury.
MAMA is such a large character within the city, we wanted to ensure the site reflected this, and cemented the museum as an integral part of the Albury experience, helping visitors plan their trip and look forward to their time in regional NSW.
Solution
With a core objective to increase conversions of ticket sales, studio classes and tours, we underwent a long and interrogative UX period to simplify the structure of the site. We wanted it to be as easy as possible for visitors to find something that piqued their interest and move them down the funnel in terms of consideration.
Part of our solution to MAMA’s complex ticketing and scheduling needs was a custom date picker. This proved to be challenging for our engineers as we had to enable MAMA’s content team the flexibility to choose from myriad different date options, as there was no standard date convention for the breadth of events MAMA runs - i.e. every second Tuesday in March, or Mon-Wed for the first week of the month. We engineered a custom solution within the CMS, which pushes data to the search platform, then allowing the user to filter or search by contextual dates (Today, Tomorrow, This Week etc,) on the frontend.
By allowing site visitors better visibility of upcoming sessions they could take part in, and letting them explore in a more colloquial and contextual manner (finding out what’s on this week or this month, rather than selecting specific dates) we encouraged engagement and facilitated trip planning.
A consistent design language
The design is clean and functional, allowing Mark Gowing’s bespoke type to take centre stage. A strong, gridded approach forms the foundation of the design system, aligning the content and creating a pleasing Swiss design aesthetic.
Once site visitors had decided a trip to Albury was on the cards, bold UI items make next steps clear, and encourage ticket purchase and event registration.
A colourful experience
With a wealth of bright, bold content on the site, we created a cursor which auto-picks the colour from the background image on hover. This creates a fun and interactive experience for the user and encourages exploration.
For the homepage, and featured Exhibition pages, we took the hero image and overlaid the bespoke typography, then incorporated coloured backgrounds to create a bold impression. This ensured the typography was leveraged to create a consistent experience from online to offline, as each exhibition has its own distinct graphic identity which is leveraged within MAMA’s walls and throughout their collateral.
