Coachella
Coachella’s beautiful new website represents their powerful brand as the world’s leading music festival to millions of fans.
Challenges
Goldenvoice asked Mondo Robot to rethink the look, feel, and technical backend of their hugely popular website. We designed an engaging experience for millions of online fans who participate remotely and a useful gateway to attendee experience at the festival, supported by a powerful and intuitive design system to enable many stakeholders to update information on the fly.
I led UX on the project and advised on content and digital strategy. I was supported by in-house project management, art direction and illustration, and technical teams, as well as client content, brand, and technical stakeholders.
Solutions
Fan needs and seasonal cycles
We started the project with a deep dive into analytics from past years, coupled with discovery about the yearly cycle of ticket sales, lineup announcements, and related events leading up to the live festival weekends.
We discovered massive spikes in traffic correlating with seasonal events. We analyzed search data and cross referenced page traffic against site structure to discover user needs that were not being served efficiently by the current site.
Intuitive IA
We engaged representative users to learn what content groupings made sense to them, using a card sort followed by tree testing. These results, and prior insights from analytics research were all applied to a significantly clarified IA.
Building Beauty
Meanwhile, our designers and Illustrators explored themes to express the emotion and creativity of this impactful cultural event.
modular building blocks
With approved IA and creative concepts, we began directly addressing content needs with a comprehensive set of mobile-first wireframes. With thousands of moving parts, from top-secret artist lineups to last-minute food vendors, our recommendations needed to be both focused and flexible.
We created page level templates to solve for common content needs, from information about car camping to ADA accessibility to vegan dining options.
Defining the design system
To help the client team move rapidly from concept and structure to final content, we built a template-based Gather Content instance that could be edited and reviewed by the entire stakeholder team, and a detailed module guide. Each item in the design hierarchy was defined, aligned 1:1 with the CMS.
Outcomes
The site went live with the widely anticipated lineup announcement just after the New Year, 2019. It has been the mouthpiece of Coachella to the world, from artist announcements to festival logistics, and the gateway to YouTube Music's live stream of the event. It continues to address the needs of millions of fans. For 2020, Goldenvoice has again engaged Mondo Robot. The site's look will be updated, with the underlying structure and UX remaining in place.
And, our team got artist passes to the festival!
