MCSF: Design Issues
The biggest improvement for concert goers relates to concert information and ticket purchase. Design issues will be discussed below based on the part of the user journey to which they pertain.
Discover MCSF
Access to the site content beyond the home page is via the navigation menu only. Exploring the menu, especially on mobile, may not engage visitors optimally, if they use it at all, as it appears only as a "hamburger menu", and even after opening it, the items are small and difficult to click.
Figure 1: Mobile navigation
Research Concerts
The original design listed upcoming concerts by name of the work, but users would need to dig deeper into the text to find the dates of the shows. While progressive disclosure is a good thing, the date information is crucial enough to be presented prominently. It can increase excitement in users, "Oh, there's a show coming up soon!" Also, the fonts used were not conducive to quick scanning, especially for users of the median age of typical concert attendees.
Figure 2: Concert listing
Purchase
Actually purchasing tickets was considerably non-optimal, as once a concert was found on the home page, 3 more clicks were needed to get to the page where tickets could be added to a shopping cart. The user was forced to decide their time and venue multiple times, with intervening pages providing no value nor affordance as to what to click next, or exclusively having data that would be useful on the "Add to Cart" page.
Figure 3a: Initial detail
Figure 3b: Interstitial
Figure 3c: Add to Cart
For users exploring the site, the only way to get back to ticket information was to go back to the home page and scroll. Concert information and ticket purchasing were not found on the navigation menu. This added unnecessary interaction to the experience.
Figure 4: Navigation
The Chorale's business lead pointed out that some customers are local for only part of the year, and would like to be able to have tickets sent to a different address than the billing address. The site currently does not allow this.
Attend
Once tickets were purchased, the site did not help the user reach the chosen venue. They were on their own to use a search engine or mapping app to find how to get to their concert.
Concert information was split up between the pages for the concert so that you would go to one place to see venue, date, and time information, but another to find the phone number to call about tickets.
See earlier Figures 3a and 3c.
Post-concert
The site has only minimal engagement after a concert that might entice users to get more involved with the Chorale.
Engage with MCSF
Audition information was out of date, and there was no assistance in finding the venue. There is not a lot there to excite or engage prospective singers.
Visual style
The site uses a traffic-cone orange theme, with a saturated blue hue used for the "pre-footer" area. This does not pose a problem. However, the blue color was also used in the orange navigation menu as text highlight. The blue and orange combination is noticeable, but is difficult to read and even "vibrates" somewhat.
Figure 5: Navigation colors
The site has not taken advantage of element styling for certain components. The "card layout" for images, where the image is to one side and text on the other, was using the default black and white colors. It was also using fonts that appear nowhere else in the site. Other potential image layouts were not styled or used anywhere in the site.
Figure 6: Element without thematic styling
