Image Credit : Studio Bravo
Project Overview
The Melbourne Recital Centre (MRC) website was a long time coming. After a decade with an outdated site, MRC finally had the opportunity to create a world-class digital experience that matched the excellence of their live performances. Coinciding with a major brand refresh, this project was more than a redesign. It was about giving MRC a new face, one that would stand proudly within Melbourne’s evolving Arts Precinct redevelopment.
The result? A beautifully designed, accessible, flexible, and engaging platform that reinvigorates how audiences discover, explore, and book performances at one of Australia’s premier cultural institutions.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Project Brief
Melbourne Recital Centre is renowned for its extraordinary live music experiences. As part of a new brand refresh, they needed a website that elevated their identity while improving the digital experience, bridging the gap between online and onsite engagement.
Key goals included:
- Bringing the new brand to life through thoughtful colour integration and dynamic event visuals.
- Improving accessibility, ensuring an inclusive experience for all users.
- Reimagining event discovery with a more immersive, visually compelling interface.
- Enhancing the ticketing journey with a custom-designed Select-Your-Own-Seat (SYOS) tool and a refined checkout flow.
The result is a premium, visually striking digital experience that makes event exploration intuitive and exciting.
Project Need
A great performance deserves a great digital stage. The previous site was holding MRC back, lacking accessibility, visual sophistication, and a seamless purchase journey.
This project introduced:
- A fully accessible experience, including an AA-compliant, custom-built SYOS tool designed to accommodate all users.
- Brand-led event storytelling, where event pages dynamically integrate colour palettes from promotional imagery, creating a visually cohesive experience.
- A flexible design system, allowing MRC to showcase artists and performances in a way that felt engaging, exciting, and uniquely their own.
By merging accessibility, brand expression, and a deeply considered user experience, the new website gives audiences an effortless, inspiring way to engage with MRC’s world-class performances.
User Experience
Great design starts with great insight. This project was deeply shaped by stakeholder and audience engagement, ensuring the site addressed real needs, from first-time visitors to seasoned concertgoers.
Key experience improvements include:
- An artistically rich, intuitive interface that encourages exploration while simplifying transactions.
- A custom checkout process, designed to keep users engaged while building out a full event experience, not just a transaction.
- A seamless, high-performance SYOS tool, crafted with accessibility in mind.
- Brand and usability work hand-in-hand, ensuring the colour strategy enhances navigation without sacrificing accessibility.
By balancing design, user psychology, and strategic functionality, the new site turns browsing into a journey and ticketing into an experience.
Project Marketing
The new Melbourne Recital Centre website isn’t just a facelift, it’s a game-changer for audience engagement.
Key outcomes since launch:
- Improved event discovery, with an agile homepage carousel and flexible upsell pathways for exploring more performances.
- Enhanced accessibility across the site, with tailored access filters in both event discovery and the SYOS tool.
- A refined and intuitive checkout flow, with new guest checkout removing barriers to purchase, contributing to the complete elimination of transaction complaints post-launch.
- More efficient donation pathways, making it easier than ever for audiences to support MRC.
- Stronger storytelling, with the new Digest section allowing MRC to highlight artists and brand narratives without needing separate microsites.
- A dramatic improvement in page load times, creating a more seamless browsing experience.
The site’s performance, usability, and accessibility have dramatically improved the audience experience, reducing bottlenecks, increasing engagement, and setting the stage for the future of MRC’s digital presence.
Project Privacy
The MRC website was developed with a strong focus on protecting user privacy and data security. Sensitive transactions such as ticket purchases and account management are securely handled via Tessitura’s ticketing CRM, which is PCI-compliant and uses encrypted, best-practice protocols to safeguard user data.
The website does not store personally identifiable information within the CMS, and session communication is encrypted and securely managed using SHA-256 encryption.
A dedicated policies page is provided, where users can access detailed documents outlining MRC’s commitments across privacy and other key areas.
This approach ensures users can engage with confidence, knowing their information is handled responsibly and securely.
Digital - Entertainment & Leisure
Digital services have overtaken entertainment and leisure. They influence what and how we watch or listen to, where and how we eat, dine and play, how we book and how we interact before during and after entertainment events. We're looking for nominations that make entertainment even more entertaining.
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