Consumer website for VisitScotland

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

THe Visit Scotland website can be seen here.

As Design Manager at Visit Scotland and creative lead on the website project, in addition to design development, my function was to ensure the we designers create a site that met the needs of the target audience groups, while remaining easy to use, accessible and visually engaging. The challenges were mostly in response to the scale of the site and the long duration of the development (over two years). An addiitional, and not insignificant challenge was that we were working within a public sector framework, yet had to create a visually stunning site that promoted Scotland as an open welcoming, 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 we needed to convey 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 would be developed further over the coming years. In this way we could ensure consistency of design development as the project progressed into the future.