Consumer website for VisitScotland

VisitScotland.com website is VisitScotland’s flagship consumer website.

My role was as creative lead on the website. The main aim for the design team was to create a site that met the needs of the target groups while remaining easy to use, clear and accessible. The challenges here were in regard to the scale and the duration of the development phase (over two years). We also needed to create a site that was built within a public sector framework but still managed to maximise the promotion of Scotland as an open welcoming, visually stunning tourism destination.

The design development involved extensive user research processes, benchmarking our designs across a range of competitor destination marketing sites. This initial user-research enabled us to create categories for determining the success of the visual impact of the design. These were mostly intangible categories such as feeling and confidence, but encompassed usability too.

Once the designs were fully developed, we did a second round of user testing to assess how closely our designs had achieved the desired emotional impact and made subsequent fine adjustments. One area we struggled a great deal with was ‘Scottishness’ and what exactly this was in this context.

Working closely within this framework we developed a creative strategy document to embed a direction and design structure across a project that we anticipated developing over years. In this way we could ensure consistency of design development as the project progressed and into the future.

The site is due to go live in March 2022.