VisitScotland.com – Strategic Workshop

• The brief
• How we responded to the brief
• What we did
• The outcomes
• Timing and costs

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The Brief

VisitScotland.com is a public-private partnership partly owned by Visit Scotland. The site is aimed at visitors from outside the area and the local population with an interest in travelling within Scotland. VisitScotland.com and its stakeholders wanted to develop a shared understanding amongst key internal stakeholders about the issues that affect the usability of the site and the best process for improving its usability. There was a desire to ‘get on with things’ and make improvements as soon as possible, but resources for redevelopment were limited.

How we responded to the brief

Following a usability testing session we recommended a strategic workshop. The objectives were:

• To gain a shared understanding of the usability and information architecture issues of the main visitscotland.com website and associated niche and regional sites
• Identify target users and user goals
• To understand Visit Scotland and visitscotland.com aims for the site
• To discuss a process for the review and future development of the main, niche and regional sites (one that ensures it will be user focused, but which can be achieved quickly and economically)
• To make recommendations about next steps

What we did

At a workshop an edited video of the usability testing of VisitScotland.com website was shown. The participants were ‘active’ observers, writing issues on post-its as they occurred. A discussion was then facilitated by a WUP consultant to agree key issues with the site. The participants then considered their site aims and the user goals the site was to support and a process for the redevelopment of the site – helped by break-out group exercises and the use of reference websites.

The outcomes

A wide variety of usability issues were identified, along with possible solutions. The participants considered the VisitScotland.com site aims and concluded that a detailed set of aims needed to be developed to help judge the suitability of site content. A site re-development process was agreed along with recognising that a new approach to the site content and site management was required.

“WUP really helped us establish an understanding of usability concepts and the issues affecting our site. They challenged us to think about key underlying principles: who are our target users; their goals, and which goals we should make it our priorities to meet” Paul Wedgwood – Business Development Director

Timing and costs

The workshop was conducted in spring 2006, and including the user testing and reporting took about 3 days at a cost of £1,750 (The user testing was in addition to this)

Contact us for more information on how WUP can help you with strategic workshops.

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