The Future Of Air Shows

Improving The Visit Product

IWM Duxford holds three air shows every year. They are one of the most successful events at IWM.

By the time we launched the responsive site in July we only had four sprints of work to make the last 2015 air show better. So, we split the work into short term and long term. This post is about the long term.

A wee bit of context

• The air show pages were displayed in the general events listing. We did some remote video testing and discovered this confused users because they didn’t know if an air show would be classed as an event or exhibition
• The air show pages were getting unpublished after the event occurred
• When there were no air show pages live we didn’t have anywhere to communicate that Duxford holds air shows every year
• The visitor services team get huge volumes of enquiries asking when the 2016 air shows are (basic user expectation alert!)

The Next Steps

The first thing we did was to figure out the user stories and what are we already doing that meet those needs.

I ran a workshop with my Marketing colleague and other key members of the team to find out.

We came up with a bunch of user and business needs, written as stories. We worked through the stories and figured out that we already delivered the MVP. Good times.

But there were some glaring holes.

As a regular air show visitor I want to know when the next air show is so that I can plan what air shows to go to in 2016

The above user story on just one of them. We know from our Visitor Services team that users contact IWM for the dates of the 2016 air shows all the time.

To find a solution we did some serious data modelling.

The URL

Our Developer, Technical Manager and I discussed the structure. The URL needed to be:

• Readable by people
• Hackable so that the user always lands on a real page and doesn’t get an error message
• Persistent and can easily be re-directed if necessary

There is a great blog post on designing URLs for the BBC which really helped me with this.

We took into account that:

• The air shows are only at IWM Duxford
• Three air shows happen every calendar year

We decided the structure should be:

/iwm-duxford/airshows/year/airshowtitle

This structure respects the hierarchy of our site, is readable, hackable, persistent and easy to use for marketing purposes.

The child pages

Historically IWM have either linked PDFs from the air show page or used orphan pages to display the other information needed for air shows.

Each airshow always has certain things:

• A list of the planes flying in the display
• Various packages for tickets
• Specific directions for air shows

Using PDFs and orphan pages meant the content wasn’t easily found by search engines or users. The pages also didn’t have menu highlighting so when users landed on the pages it wasn’t clear they were part of the air shows.

We’ve done some work so that if we tag a page with ‘air shows’ the menu highlight will show IWM Duxford>Air Shows and for now we are using content to link back to the specific air show page.

However, we’ve started thinking about how users can get to the child pages from the specific air show page. We’re still working on what this will look like and how it will function. As always we’re testing our assumptions and working from there.

The first iteration

The air show section

• We’ve got an air show section on IWM Duxford, using the same styling as the events listing
• We’ve developed a solution to answer the used need ‘when are the next air shows’ with a block we can place on the /airshows page
• The 2015 air shows are back from the dead to show users how many IWM Duxford do and what they are like
• Air shows can now have child pages. The menu highlights the correct path

User testing

The same day we released the air show section and ‘next air show’ block I set up some remote video user testing.

The task was: Where would you go to find out when the next air show is on at IWM Duxford?

The results? 10 out of 10 users were able to find the page and identify when the next air shows were on. Excellent!

Watch a user on iwm.org.uk finding out when the next air shows are

It isn’t over

This isn’t the end. Tickets go on sale for the 2016 air shows before Christmas so we’re aiming to get a few more things sorted:

• We are working on some amends to the air show page so it is easier to navigate to the child pages of a specific air show
• We want to test if users will give us their email address from the air shows listing page so we can tell them when tickets go on sale. The hypothesis is that this will solve the user need ‘I want to know when I can buy tickets for the 2016 air shows’
• We will measure if enquiries to the visitors services team decrease regarding the 2016 air show dates
• We want to make finding the prices easier as this has proved difficult in testing. We’re doing some guerrilla user testing at the moment and found that our attempt at making it easier added a layer of confusion. But luckily we were only testing paper designs. So it’s back to the drawing board

I’ll write something up about the progress here on Release Notes.