Renewing Digital Presence for a Premier Arts and Culture Festival
Driving Engagement and Attendance Through User Experience
Challenge
Spring of Culture is Bahrain’s premier festival of arts, music, and entertainment, managed and executed by the Bahrain Economic Development Board. The organizing team was in the process of planning for its upcoming season of events but faced multiple usability, marketing, and awareness challenges with their existing digital properties.
The outdated website lacked search and filter functions and didn’t have avenues to promote specific events or the ability to link tickets and maps. The site also utilized a complex content management system. The mobile app faced similar issues and also lacked user-centric functionality that would encourage visitors to download the app.
Working under a compressed timeframe, MBLM designed the UI and UX for a renewed digital experience. We developed a new website and native iOS and Android mobile apps with a focus on user experience and value-added functionality, to drive page views, engagement, and ultimately, event attendance.
The website placed ease of discovery at the forefront, categorizing the full list of festival activities, elevating featured events, and offering simple date, location, and type based filters and searches. Event pages were crafted to be as informative and useful as possible, including map locations, sortable timings, social media, and YouTube feeds, and links to tickets, directions, and calendar event creation.
The native Android and iOS mobile applications included the ability to save events, create custom lists of favorites, and easily share items with others. Furthermore, the apps included built-in push notification functionalities, allowing the Bahrain EDB team to automate notifications for user-saved events and promote specific events that needed a boost in attendance.
The new website and apps were built on a common CMS, allowing organizers to change content on the fly from a single source, for any of their 80-plus events.
Results
With a design, development and population process of just under 10 weeks, MBLM prepared a brand new digital presence for the Spring of Culture festival to launch to a huge influx of visitors.
