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Driving a new digital era for London Transport Museum

For the past decade, London Transport Museum has been using a principally unchanged website to bring schools, families and transport enthusiasts the latest updates on installations, exhibitions, and events. LTM wanted to future proof the museum from a digital perspective and become a leader in the museum and cultural sector. A key aspect of the change would be removing a series of bespoke frameworks that required steep maintenance and heavy customisation.

Brand Name

London Transport Museum

Services Offered

Branding strategy, CMS, Creative design, Exhibitions, UX and UI, Web design, Web development

About the Client:

Located in the heart of Covent Garden, London Transport Museum (LTM) is the world’s leading museum of urban transport. Their charitable mission is to use the story of transport to encourage, enrich, and to ignite curiosity for all Londoners and those who love the city. The Museum’s investment in transforming its online presence is a long-term strategic decision made in 2019. Driven by the desire to simplify the customer journey, the Museum wants to increase opportunities for people to discover fascinating content about London’s transport past and present.

Business Challenge:

As such, our brain-box team were appointed to deliver: - A series of discovery and strategic workshops to uncover & refine the museum’s digital vision. - User-experience designs. - A digitally inclusive Drupal platform. - Tools to empower site managers and make content delivery simple. For a deeper dive into the digital strategy behind the London Transport Museum, visit the case study by our strategy & user experience agency, Stardotstar.

Collections Online:

More than a quarter of a million artefacts in the Museum’s collection are accessible through an enhanced elastic search, enabled by manual tagging and intention interpretive data networks. A new sliding date range search feature is also ideal for researchers of particular eras or schools focusing on precise decades. The ‘Collections’ element of the site has been built to host multimedia content capable of showcasing detailed drawings, maps, video and audio content for rich storytelling. Drawing upon an ecommerce-like interface, specifications and key details are displayed clearly in accordions and boxes, fully accessible by keyboard and screen readers. A new section dedicated to short-form and long-form reads gives visitors to the website the opportunity to explore different themes and topics of interest. Users can explore everything from the history of engineering to the role of women in transport and the design heritage of London’s iconic Tube map, advertising posters and moquette seating.

Hidden London:

As a popular tourist attraction and favourite of London aficionados, London Transport Museum’s Hidden London tours allow visitors to explore ‘forgotten’ parts of the Tube network and discover London from an entirely different perspective. The Museum’s previous website framework limited its ability to customise content for its tours. But the new digital platform now showcases Hidden London front and centre with an immersive look and feel. This aims to increase interest and bookings for all sites displayed by location, including a new series of virtual tours, which can be enjoyed from the comfort of your sofa, as well as the award-winning Hidden London exhibition and retail range.

Entry and Ticketing:

When the Museum reopens, live ticket updates and offers are now made available in a secondary ‘utility’ navigation, enabling people to safely pre-book online designated entry slots. When the Museum reopened after the first lockdown in September, this feature becomes ever more important, designed to manage the flow of visitors to the museum and give each patron enough space and time to fully enjoy the exhibits.

Quality Assurance:

All of our projects undergo rigorous testing, throughout the software development process. In order to deliver the utmost quality for clients and their respective users, our in-house QA team ensure that all end products perform accurately and reliably under normal and abnormal conditions. Testing is followed by continual monitoring of software performance, to prevent reoccurrence of any issues and to ensure efficient ongoing operation. As such, we were able to confidently deliver a well-designed, scalable and technically stable result.

Results:

 

"Having a new and improved website is a complete game-changer for the Museum as it has allowed us to bring our collection and its fascinating stories to a global audience, with an improved user experience and focus on rich, searchable, shareable content.

 

Previously, we had a number of disparate websites with little integration in place between them and no cohesive digital roadmap. Now, with the help of the CTI Digital team, we have taken a huge step forward with our digital ambitions.

 

Amongst the many great features, we are particularly proud of our new Stories section, revealing the often unheard history of people, places and transport. Everyone at London Transport Museum, including myself, are excited to begin on our phase 2 projects with CTI and to keep enhancing our digital output."

 

Harriet Burke, Head of Digital Marketing at London Transport Museum

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