Case Study: SouthAustralia.com Website

As a designer, it is a rare honour to have an opportunity to design the digital representation of your home state. I thoroughly enjoyed both the UX strategy and UI design on this large scale project.

The South Australia Tourism Commission needed a fresh new look for the tourism website for South Australia — southaustralia.com.

SATC ran their own CMS and integrated with the Australian Tourism Data Warehouse. They required UX strategy, UI design, and front-end engineering.

The main objective of the new website was to attract visitors to the state and generate bookings for the amazing local operators — whose details would be sourced from the Data Warehouse.

My role

I was responsible for the User Experience strategy as well as the User Interface design outlined in this case study and led the team responsible for delivering the entire project.

Strategy

The UX strategy covered the goals and flows of the relevant personas and led us to a multi-tiered, location-based Information Architecture.

With at least 50% of visitors coming from mobile devices, a mobile-first approach was taken to all solution design.

The key journeys included:

• the ability to explore via location/destination
• information needed to plan a trip, including a Trip Planner and an accommodation database
• ‘things to do’ based on categories like Attractions and Food & Drink
• a travel blog and events database

For the mobile and desktop navigation, I worked on a simple and highly usable design pattern that catered to the 2 or 3 nested layers within the IA.

Like the mobile navigation, the desktop navigation takes over the screen and chunks the IA into an easily consumable menu that caters to the different personas and their user flows.

Navigation:

Brand

South Australia had recently launched its Ken Cato designed branding and iconic logo. I worked collaboratively with the SATC Brand Team to iterate on multiple styles of UI design that showcased the amazing photography available, took the user through a magazine-like flow, and enticed the user to engage with the amazing SA experiences.

Navigating the expansive Australian Tourism Data Warehouse

The website houses thousands of experiences, accommodations, events, etc., all navigable via region, time of event, or attraction type.

I designed a mobile-first, card-based listing with filters that allowed the user to narrow down the expansive data set according to their own preferences or plans. This was accompanied by a map-based search for those on the road or planning a trip. It allowed for people to add items to their wishlist / planned trips.

Booking landing pages

Accommodation & attraction data populated immersive landing pages with great video and photographic content. These landing pages housed the key goal and metric of the website — to make a booking.

Region based user flows

Regional landing pages with their own sub-navigation are tailored for SEO, as well as for tourists planning a trip centred around a single location.

A digital magazine

The Blog played an important part in attracting visitors through social channels, SEO and marketing efforts. It was also important for the Brand Team for it to look and feel like a premium digital magazine — to show off our great state and its attractions.

All work on the project was completed with the talented team at atomix.com.au while I was Head of Design.