The Washington Ballet
Audience Journey, Website Design and Development
The Washington Ballet needed a new, modern look to help the communication challenges of both serving the nation’s capital with an evolving repertoire and serving as a platform for a diverse community of world-class artists. Their education department had grown into a complex, in-demand set of classes for beginners and professional talents, which made it hard for beginners to find appropriate classes to fit their schedule. The staff was also burdened with an overly complex set of content management controls that made it hard to manage event sales and collect customer data in a useful way.
We started with an immersive home page design which put the experience of TWB’s performances front and center, with optimized background video and minimalist promotional text to offset full-screen photography. We drastically simplified the ability of students to browse through the class catalog by schedule, experience level, and class location, making it easier to find the right class.
We put TWB’s ensemble front and center with controls and landing pages to feature specific performers and their performance history, bios, and videos, allowing patrons to explore the deeper context of each dancer and instructor’s background.
On the back end, we developed an intuitive set of controls to give TWB a flexible and intuitive new home on the web that was built to grow with them.