The Freedom Trail Foundation
As part of a graduate school project at Northeastern University, I engaged in a comprehensive design process to complete a full re-envisioning of the Freedom Trail Foundation's desktop and mobile sites. By consistently emphasizing the needs of the site's key audiences, I was able to create designs that underscored the brand's educational, community-focused values and effectively highlighted the engaging, immersive history tourism experiences that the foundation provides.
Bringing History to Life
Problem: The original Freedom Trail Foundation website sacrificed informational organization and functionality for visual appeal and embellishments. It was difficult to navigate and scroll around, contained many distracting design elements, and failed to properly understand its target audience's main goal of buying tour tickets.
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Solution: It was of the utmost importance that my designs consistently include "at-a-glance" features that help quickly and conveniently funnel users from key target audiences to more elaborate, information-heavy pages. It was also crucial to ensure that users can easily navigate to ticket purchasing pages for the tours, which are the Freedom Trail Foundation's primary source of revenue and the main goal for the largest target audiences.
Planning Process
Brand Research
Through extensive research of the Freedom Trail brand and its stakeholders, I determined that the primary target audience is American tourists above the age of 35 with an interest in and generally positive impression of U.S. history and limited qualms about spending a little extra money for an enhanced visitor experience. With this in mind, it became clear that emphasizing ticket sales and easy viewing of the tour options would be of paramount importance for every aspect of my designs moving forward.
Wireframes
In these early attempts to begin visualizing my Freedom Trail Foundation website designs, I focused on convenient site navigation and an intuitive user experience that helps members of the target audience get where they want to go as easily as possible. This did not come at the expense of the rich tapestry of historical information that the site provides, but was rather an effort to realign the site's focus to the goals of its key users.
Home Page
All Tours
Individual Tour
All Sites
Individual Site
Final Desktop Designs
Home Page
The original home page was clunky and oversaturated, requiring a lot of scrolling to access key information. My new design is streamlined, intuitive, and emphasizes speedy navigation that funnels users to the correct pages efficiently. This design both enhances the user experience and drives tour sales for the foundation.
Individual Site
The Freedom Trail Foundation is the definitive source of information on many iconic Boston landmarks. This design consolidates that information in a clean, stylish way, providing substance while maintaining visual appeal.
Individual Tour
This design's "at-a-glance" style allows users to quickly learn key information about the tour and determine if it's the right offering for them. The large golden "Purchase Tickets Now" button in the hero is emblematic of a renewed focus on facilitating ticket sales.
All Sites
The original page went one site at a time, making it quite difficult to consider all the site options and choose one to learn more about. My desktop design's three column approach immediately informs the viewer of all the offerings on the trail in a way that visually highlights the large quantity of sites for visitors to enjoy.
All Tours
The use of tour cards with informational overviews in this design helps the user learn more, faster. The design also includes many links to the ticket purchasing page to ensure that this key conversion is always visible to users.
Field Trips
The current field trips page is very sparse, making it seem almost like an afterthought. I viewed this as a missed opportunity to inform educators and bring large groups to the trail. I therefore created this page to allow school administrators to learn more about this offering and conveniently contact the Foundation.