Redesigning Bath & North East Somerset Council's websites

Racking up close to a million visitors every year, The Roman Baths is easily one of the most popular tourist attractions in the South West. The nearby Fashion Museum has similar standing as one of the foremost in the world, housing a rare collection of Georgian costumes and featuring the ‘dress of the year'. Not many people know both venues are both governed by the Bath & North East Somerset Council Heritage Services (BANES).

Our brief was to design a set of sites for the BANES venues, each with a compelling and distinct digital presence that remained part of a clear family. BANES were keen to promote their connection with the tourist hotspots of their beloved city. Other less well-known venues would be promoted alongside more popular ones, such as the Roman Baths.

One of our first concepts was the ‘site picker’ - featuring a strip of site logos that lets the user choose their desired venue. Once selected, each site changes in colour and content while retaining the same layout. Design-wise, we wanted to convey a sense of place, incorporating the wonderful imagery on offer. Our hope was to inspire potential visitors as well as give them everything they needed to plan their visit.

We carried out user testing on actual visitors we managed to collar in the queue for the Roman Baths and asked them to complete a series of tasks while we recorded audio, video and mouse movement - turns out plug sockets are a little hard to access in Victorian wood-panelled meeting rooms...

Feedback suggested that we needed to give even greater prominence to our ‘site picker’, so we worked on getting the wording exactly right, checking in with our Google expert who recommended Other things to do as the key phrase for those searching online.

The result: an elegantly designed family of sites to suitably promote Bath’s cultural treasures.