Naturalis
Design / UX
Nominee
Case description
Naturalis is the center for biodiversity. A major renovation of the building ensures that there is room for the impressive collection of objects, research facilities and museum. When the museum closed in September 2018, the website became the primary means of communication for Naturalis leading up to the reopening in September 2019.Case goals and results
DPDK created the UX and design of the new online Naturalis. A wonderful concept that SWIS and Naturalis realized within seven weeks. This included user research in a lab-setting. With our Drupal 8 distribution based on the paragraphs module, we developed a fully-fledged website for (inter-)national visitors, including motion and complex transitions.The website informed visitors about the renovation. In addition, it is the portal to inspire and inform about nature. Naturalis online aspires to be thé place for anyone who wants to discover more about nature. The success of this aspiration is shown in the SEO (Organic) and SEA (Advertising) engagement-results. They didn’t decrease while the museum was closed.
- August 2019 is the fourth best month ever in terms of website visits. Over 84% more visitors than last year. With most visits (65%) being organic.
- CTR of advertisements was 33% (Google minimum requirement is 5%).
- Since the re-opening of Naturalis in September 2019 they sold significantly more tickets than expected. Thanks to their marketing team whom streamlined the online and offline marketing.
Challenges
The biggest challenge was to realize a MVP within a very short time. Mostly because we needed to create an unique experience with motion and complex transitions. We used the paragraphs-module to create the building-blocks. Including pre-formatted animations like little creatures that crawl on your screen.Since Naturalis was closed for renovation, the website was still open. We wanted to inspire website-visitors, despite the fact that Naturalis itself is closed. The visit to Naturalis museum should be an awesome experience, online and offline!
Motions and complex transitions are build with Lottie-web. An adobe after effects renderer built by Airbnb. The website is also linked to Converis, a research information system, to synchronize all scientific articles. This is done through the Drupal Migrations API. And last but not least: Salesforce Marketingcloud integration for newsletter subscriptions triggering marketing automation.
Also, we’ve learned from user research (in a lab-setting) that an item “practical information” had to be added to the navigation. This was one of the surprising additions to the developed strategy, UX and designs. This turned out to be one of the most popular pages.
After we launched the MVP, we started to integrate other systems and features such as the ticketing platform, Worldmaps to explore the world of Naturalis and a calendar for their daily event for an optimal digital experience. This is a continuous process of SWIS and the Naturalis team.
Community contributions
We have submitted a number of patches during and after the development of this project:Drupal core
• Contextual Links do not respect pathPrefix updated 9 Nov 2018 at 06:39 UTC
• Processing paths in LanguageNegotiationUserAdmin causes 404s while accessing private files updated 7 Oct 2018 at 21:59 UTC
Webform
• Call to a member function id() on null updated 1 Apr 2019 at 10:19 UTC
snowball_stemmer
• Stemming cache should be per language updated 8 Dec 2018 at 13:14 UTC
imageapi_optimize
• Wrong config prefix for pipelines updated 25 Aug 2018 at 06:04 UTC
https://www.drupal.org/project/allowed_formats/issues/2884040
• Call to a member function id() on null updated 1 Apr 2019 at 10:19 UTC
• Disabled element types can still be created by users with update access updated 30 Jan 2019 at 08:04 UTC