Musica Viva is the largest presenter of chamber music in the world, a nationally renowned company with offices in every Australian state and territory, reaching approximately 360,000 people directly every year. Red Crow Digital were engaged by Musica Viva to begin planning a new and exciting web presence including seamless integration with globally recognised CRM and ticketing software Tessitura.
For anyone that employs Tessitura for their CRM, ticketing, fundraising or memberships, you know that while Tessitura’s web product (TNEW) does a good job of delivering the basics, sometimes a more tailored, organisation-specific solution is required. This was a main focus of the project.
To create a seamless, straight-through flow for customers to login, select seats, tickets and ultimately make their purchase, we needed to think outside the box, while ironically staying inside it! i.e. removing the 'jumps’ between Musica Viva’s website and Tessitura’s web solution.
"There is no mobile experience which is hugely concerning from a ... customer experience point of view with more and more people viewing websites primarily on mobile devices."
The other major challenge was designing a solution that was mobile-focused for the now and for the future as mobile page-view growth continues. We knew how important this was, as did our stakeholders at Musica Viva. This helped us define the problems and the scope of the project which help align thinking and overall strategy regarding our approach to tackling the solution.
To begin the project it was important to engage the major stakeholders of Musica Viva and enter the discovery phase: where we gather insight into the business and the stakeholders, begin to unearth
problems and limitations and also give everyone a voice to express how they see the business moving and growing into the future.
"Slow. Lacks mobile compatibility. Cumbersome navigation. Too many clicks. Fragmented and unintuitive. Stale. Not holistic. Inflexible. Not accessible."
This was also a chance for the staff and management at Musica Viva to anonymously review their current systems, platforms and also relay feedback they had gathered over the years from their customers. This
was very insightful for us as the business has many different moving parts and departments which had different problems and needs from the system.
In the end, much of the feedback from the business was along the same narrative as our own investigation and audit: the website is dated and lacks quality content, it's unusable on mobile, ticketing and payment was difficult and non-linear, and the website struggles to adequately serve the many different facets of the business and create an environment for customers to learn, discover and engage.
It was important the experience and design was focused on being content-driven and easily accessible. With this in mind the design process started by identifying and defining the information architecture, organising the many different facets of the business into easily identifiable sections, and creating a navigation system to match - both via menus and allowing for browsing-style navigation (where the visitor can dig into content via well organised lists, filters and additional information).
Musica Viva is a complex business with lots of moving parts, including very separate operations within the overall business. The designed experience, while reasonably conservative, satisfies the requirements for content structure, departmental landing/homepages, mobile-first usage and full accessibility across browsers and devices.
"It's important our audience has easy access to our product and an ease method of purchase once they have been suitably informed & inspired!"
After a few rounds of UI and visual design ideas and revisions we arrived at a minimalistic design for the header and navigation, where browsing is encouraged but there also exists a thorough main navigation - hidden until needed. The idea here is allow stunning visuals to help drive engagement and draw the visitor into the content rather than be an out-of-date, directory-style experience.
"We're looking forward to the possibilities created with the introduction of this new platform that seemed like an impossible dream, until now!"
After examining Musica Viva’s existing systems and obtaining feedback from their management, staff and other stakeholders, it became obvious to us that a new, purpose-built technical solution would be of great benefit to them. A number of different solutions were presented to Musica Viva, each with their own pros, cons, budgets and timelines, until an option was decided upon that would best serve the organisation now and many years into the future.
The technical solution comprised of a new website based on Red Crow Digital’s enterprise-level content management system (Sigma CMS), paired with Tessitura’s API via a specially designed middleware that brings it all together. This offered Musica Viva all the benefits of a stable, secure, easy to use CMS, integrated seamlessly with their existing CRM and ticketing box-office system.
While it's common knowledge no web-based application is ever truely finished, but rather an evolving and growing entity, we are very proud with the results the team achieved. There were some headaches and curve-balls throughout the journey but in the end we completed the challenge, successfully integrating Tessitura's CRM and ticketing engine into a seamless flow for users, while creating a more accessible experience and lifting Musica Viva's online presence into the 21st Century.