Kentico Website rebuild for The Musicians' Union
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The Musicians' Union asked us to work closely with their members, to refocus their digital brand presence, and rebuild their website. Making sure members get the best brand experience when they need it.
Who are The Musicians' Union?
The Musicians' Union (MU) is a trade union representing over 32,000 musicians working across various sectors of the British music industry, including performance, teaching, and composing. Established in 1893, the union aims to protect the rights of its members by working on issues such as fair pay, copyright protection, and working conditions.
What they needed
The Musicians' Union wanted a complete website rebuild. As an organisation, they have a high threshold for delivering a user-first experience. For this project, the focus on user experience was key.
There were three key user objectives to deliver on with the new website:
Increased new member recruitment
Improved user retention
Better user experience (you can learn more about this here)
They were from the start very keen on establishing a collaborative partnership, and were open to exploration to land on the best solution. We began the project aware of what their problems were, but they needed help with how to solve these problems.
The existing Musicians' Union site had a huge amount of content and data, but had an unclear information architecture. In order to rebuild the site with a user-first experience, we needed to understand how the site worked, specifically how users could find content. With a database of over 32,000 musicians, all working in different parts of the music industry, this content needed to be easy for everyone to find.
The website also acted as a portal for their members to access member-only features and material, as well as manage their membership and profile.
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Our Solution
The technology we used was Kentico. The Musicians' Union was already on the platform, but this would have been our recommendation regardless. Kentico was able to provide access to login functionalities, A/B testing, content personalisation, as well as granular control over the content tree: all features that would improve the user experience.
The design phase for this project was extensive. As previously mentioned, there was a large volume of content, and all of it needed to be easily accessible to different types of users. This meant the site needed to be flexible. So, we took a template and component approach for the design: we designed everything individually and then pulled them all together.
Due to the levels of navigation required for the large amount of content, we needed to ensure that locating content remained accessible. We built navigation prototypes early on in the design process, completed multiple tree tests, and continued to test and build throughout development.
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What We Delivered
A user-first, responsive website with functionality fitting our client's requirements.
The results:
61%
Increase in page views
24%
Reduction in bounce rate
