Gardens By The Bay
UX / UI Design
Information Architecture Restructure & UI Revision
Gardens by the Bay is one of Singapore's top tourist attraction. Its website contains vast amounts of information for its visitors while offering the ability to purchase entrance tickets online.
Project Duration: 2 weeks.
Role: Lead UI Designer, Usability Testing Facilitator, UX Researcher.
Deliverables: Interactive Web Prototype.
Introduction
Project Brief
Research about the organization and review its website to identify potential areas of improvement.
Background
Gardens by the Bay is one of Singapore's top tourist attraction. Its website contains vast amounts of information for its visitors while offering the ability to purchase entrance tickets online.
Issue
Decreasing Revenue Increment Y-O-Y
In other words, the organization's revenue is steadily increasing, however, the increment from each year decreases.
​
Thus, the organization is not doing as well as the previous year.
Objectives
Identifying Areas Of Improvement
Review its website and identify potential areas of improvement that could potentially increase ticketing income.
Scoping
Competitor Analysis
We looked at how other large tourist attractions manage their ticketing pages and did a comparison. Singapore Zoo's ticketing page was much more simpler compared to the other 2 attractions despite all of them catering to both citizens as well as tourists. We also noted that we were able to buy both resident and tourist tickets on the same page from the Singapore Zoo's website.
Affinity Mapping
We consolidated our research from our participants through the affinity mapping method to derive key user insights to focus on.
Key Insights
1. Users visit Gardens by the Bay to spend time with their loved ones (friends & family).
2. Users visit Gardens by the Bay when there are special events or on special occasions.
3. Users need these information to plan their visit;
a. Directions
b. Price & Ticketing
c. Activties & Events Information
Persona Generation
Meet Jasmine, she always plan her outings with her family or friends. She requires information like directions, activities and pricing to decide where she would visit next.
Testing
1. Find attractions to bring your tourists friends to, given that they have half a day to visit.
2. Find information about the attractions that will help you plan your visit.
3. Proceed to buy tickets online for the attractions selected.
Testing Insights
Majority of our participants faced problems trying to purchase separate tickets for their overseas friends and themselves as these tickets were sold in different categories under the ticket selection.
Issue Prioritization
We prioritized the issues by severity and frequency and it had reflected that the ticketing page needed to be our first priority to fix.
Information Architecture
Restructure
Aside re-designing the website to allow easier navigation, the website also contained vast amount of information that caused overall user confusion.
Gardens by the Bay current site map
Gardens by the Bay redesigned site map
Card Sorting & Tree Testing
We used hybrid card sorting and tree testing methods with our participants to help us restructure the contents within the website.
Changes
1. The global navigation bar reduced from 10 sections to just 6 sections.
2. Unclear copies were re-named to reduced confusion.
3. Based on tree testing results, certain sections are now re-categorized.
Validation
Validating Design Solutions
With all the changes that we have made, it all boils down to the user's validation that would make or break our solutions.
Measure System Usability Scale (SUS) Scores
Usability test 2 (prototype) showed a tremendous improvement in terms of overall usability as compared to the current website.
​
Usability test 3 (prototype iteration) showed a slight improvement as compared to the initial prototype.
Measuring Single Ease Question (SEQ) Scores
Similarly, in the SEQ scores, there was a huge improvement in the task of buying tickets via the web prototype
Challenges
Learning Experience
The biggest challenge for our team is the time constraint we faced. It was tough to cover Information Architecture (IA) as well as re-designing the layouts of the website. I feel that one of the big takeaways from this project was the importance of scoping.
​
Initially, our team tried to take on the entire website. Which we soon realized was hard to accomplish given the time constraints. As such we scoped down to key pages that would help us to achieve the goal of the project.
​
As with many other types of team projects, the core fundamentals of teamwork, communication and management also influences the quality of the work. That being said, despite the end of the project, the UX process never ends there. The iteration process goes on and there is always room for improvement.