Culturally Website Improvements
The Initial Brief From Culturally
An additional tool (sharable calendar scheduler) hosted on culturally.co that help a group of people find a common time to attend a Culturally workshop.
About Culturally
Culturally.co is a social booking website for hand-picked, exclusive, hands-on cultural experiences in Asia. Their workshops (cooking, artisanal, artistic, musical) are a respite from the daily humdrum or everyday tourist attraction. Culturally's goal is to spread cultural awareness, raise wellness, and enrich lives.
Research
A stakeholder interview and content audit of the website were done to have a better idea of the problem space – core business, users, features and its unique selling point (USP). Culturally is still a relatively new website for B2C customers as there were no prior SEO efforts and users who came were mainly returning customers from their offline B2B efforts.
We conducted user interviews with cultural workshop goers that have attended workshops locally or overseas (age 20 to 40s). They were interviewed on their motivations and decision factors when attending one of such workshops, their previous experiences as workshop goers and their group activity organising experiences (platforms etc.).
They were also given a go at the Culturally website. Users were asked their first impressions of the site and tasked to browse and purchase a workshop that they would like to attend as an individual.
Synthesising Data
The results were synthesized into 2 personas and their experiences on Culturally were charted into the Customer Journey Map below:
Suzanna loves travelling with friends and they are always on a lookout for unique workshops while planning for their trips. She browses Culturally for the first time.
- Lack of one-stop platform for cultural workshops
- Laborious to organise group activity as she has to consolidate and share information and gather everyone’s preference
- Reluctant to book on Culturally as she experienced errors and inconsistencies on the website, and finds there is a lack of update on their social media platforms
- Able to organise group workshop easily
- A convenient way to share workshop information
Jimin is keen to learn about Singapore as well as other cultures. She does not mind attending workshops alone and has attended workshops like Peranakan cooking and Batik printing. She got to know Culturally through word-of-mouth, tried out a Typesetting workshop, likes it and would love to invite her friends along.
- As an existing user of Culturally, she sometimes finds it a hassle to find a workshop that she can attend alone as the minimum no. of pax required is not stated upfront
- Shortlist workshop that she can attend alone easily
- Share and invite her friends to the workshop
Insights on user habits or decision factors:
- Purchasing Factors
- Price / Affordability
- Curriculum (knowledge, skills, end product)
- Duration of class
- Quality of teaching (qualification of instructor)
- Area of interest
- Size of class
- Location of class
- Organising Group Activity
- Most users will share links and organise with friends in person or via Whatsapp or other social messengers as it is more flexible for discussion. There are many other points for discussion that are non-workshop related such as, how to get there, what happens before and after the workshop
- Main factors are time, interest and budget
- User(s) will choose a few workshops and filter down to one. All party in the group will contribute
Deltas of the existing Culturally website:
Culturally homepage
Hidden gift feature and technical error
- Browsing Experience
- Inadequate and unhelpful filters that do not assist in narrowing search
- Inconsistent main navigation bar across different parts of the website disoriented users
- Key information too delayed: users had to go into individual workshop page to find out the duration of class, min/max pax for class etc.
- Confusing categorisation of workshops: users felt that some workshops should fall under more than 1 category
- Booking and Payment Experience
- Hassle to check out each workshop individually
- Unable to perform booking due to webpage hanging or error message
- Overall Brand Perception
- Does not seem credible as they are not searchable on Google. There are very little reviews and they are not active on their social media where they promote themselves most
- Diluted USP: Workshops are not entirely cultural or curated based on cities. There can be workshops of other cultures that are not unique to the city (eg. Korean cooking classes in Singapore)
Competitive Analysis
We looked at Culturally’s direct (KKday, Klook and Airbnb Experience) and indirect competitors (Classbento), the following are some of our findings:
- Filters that help users derive at their decision quicker
- A showcase of partners and endorsement upfront adds credibility to website
- Some competitors have a shopping cart while others check out directly
- Wishlist function that allows users to revisit their choices
- While its competitor offer a wide range of products including cultural experiences, tourist attractions or handicraft workshops,
Culturally’s USP is in it selection of unique local cultural workshops that needs to be highlighted
The Revised Scope
From the above research, we derived that an additional calendar scheduler tool on the website is not as crucial as improving its fundamental browsing and carting experience as well as its overall brand perception. We discussed with Culturally and redefined the project objective to:
Feature Prioritisation
The points in green below are areas that we had prioritised for the project that has high value and actionable within the time we had on our end.
Browse and Checkout
The homepage was redesigned to allow first-time users to better understand Culturally. Other than adding descriptions, we fanned out the cities of service, the types of workshops it offered and added in the credentials from its B2B efforts.
Existing Culturally homepage
Redesigned Culturally homepage
Categories were introduced to the individual city workshop listing page so users have a better idea of the type of workshops they are looking at and added a 'Uniquely local' category to filter workshops that are authentic to the place it's in which reinforces Culturally's USP.
Existing workshop list page
Redesigned workshop list page
Useful filters were added and key information extracted to display upfront to help users in sieving through the numerous workshop options.
Filters in the existing Culturally website
Filters in the final version of the prototype
Existing upfront info of workshop
Redesigned upfront info of workshop
At present, users perform payment each time they want to make a purchase for a particular workshop. The shopping cart was introduced so users are able to choose between checking out immediately or adding items to cart to make multiple bookings.
Wishlist Feature
The wishlist is an additional feature that was added to the website so users can bookmark workshops they are interested in for future purchase or organise them into boards to share and review with friends.
Organising wishlist item into board
Prototyping, Usability Testings & Iterations
A total of 2 rounds of usability testings and iterations were made to better the usability and user flow of the website before we derived at the final version that was presented to Culturally. Users have tested the 2 task scenarios below:
- Browse the homepage of Culturally, and find out about their service
- Browse and add 2 workshops from Singapore into your wishlist (A History of Singapore Typesetting first, followed by Batik In-Depth)
- Share this wishlist with your friends
- 3 of your friends decided to go Batik In-Depth with you. Go through all information about Batik In-Depth and add 4 tickets in the shopping cart
- You decided to go A History of Singapore Typesetting by yourself. Add 1 ticket for this workshop and proceed to payment for all tickets
Revisions and Improvements
Overall, users find satisfaction in using the revised website. They find the wishlist function useful and 100% were able to complete their tasks with ease. However, users find that there were too many steps in the wishlist feature and prefer to delay the organisation of items later. The flow was revised in the final prototype.
Some Thoughts & Future Developments
It was a pity that the project was a short 3 weeks as there were many other areas that can be improved. While we worked on the website’s B2C efforts, the client raised the potential of the wishlist feature being further developed for Culturally’s marketing team to facilitate their B2B service. For example, workshops can be organised into different boards based on their team-building purpose and marketed to potential clients.
Working with an existing client on their project was far different from tackling class works. When we were proposing solutions we had to discuss with the web developer to see if adding certain features on the web is feasible and also if the data that we wanted to draw was readily available. We made sure to follow an AGILE workflow, have everyone in the team involve and conducted weekly sprints over the course of 3 weeks.
At the very end, aside from reflecting on our learning through the project, it was also interesting to hear from the clients what’s their takeaway.