Tourism NI - Case Study

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Helping Tourism NI find out how much their site met their users needs

Tourism NI wanted to test how well discovernorthernireland.com served the needs of visitors to the site.

Learn how we helped Tourism NI

"Fathom worked hard to design and execute tests aimed to uncover user-driven behavioural insight into the key issues with our site. Fathom’s research and subsequent prioritised recommendations document, enriched with video highlights, have given us clear guidance as to key areas of focus and attention with regards to fresh look at design, as we embark on a future website strategy."

Lesley–Ann O’Donnell

Who are Tourism NI ?

Fathom are regularly commissioned to undertake comprehensive end–to–end projects. These span a broad range of complementary activities involved in taking initial customer research to the launch of a new website. Occasionally, however, the focus is much more specific and nuanced and hones in on one particular aspect of user experience – and that was the case for Tourism NI.

Fathom had already been involved in the beta launch of both discovernortherireland.com and tourismni.com. Tourism NI wanted to test how well discovernorthernireland.com served the needs of visitors to the site. It needed to accommodate a range of visitor needs – from users who come to the site to search for specific events, location or accommodation, to those who are generally interested and wish to browse and be delighted by what they find there.

What Fathom did

Tourism NI wanted Fathom to test on the overarching main usability themes that would be associated with any travel website.

The challenge

Fathom had already completed some work for Tourism NI when the website was in its pre–release form. Tourism NI then asked Fathom to test the usability of the site and overall performance across desktop and mobile devices as part of their ‘always–on’ optimisation.

Iterating and improving the experience

Fathom’s contribution was one element of a multi–agency programme of work and comprised several stages:

1. Data analytics provided useful information as a start to understanding the changes required to the site

2. An initial heuristic review provided further information

3. General unmoderated testing deepened the understanding

4. Moderated user testing completed the picture

This was not a linear process. Each stage provided insight and nuance which influenced how the further stages were carried out and the usability test design was shaped by the analytics and heuristics reviews. For each stage there were three or four rounds of iteration and learning to round out the knowledge required to make the necessary changes to the site to improve usability.

The outcome

2017 vs 2018

90%

Increase in number of sessions

31%

Reduction of bounce rate

81%

Increase in visit duration

Gareth Dunlop

Get in touch and discover what Fathom can do for your business.

https://www.fathom.pro/contact/

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