Waverley College Campus Tour
December, 2017
Waverley College is an independent Catholic school for boys in Sydney’s eastern suburbs with three campuses. Working with Waverley College on their website for the last two years Multiple States has developed an immersive journey for visitors to explore the school grounds online.
Kevin talks to Rachelle about creating a unique visitor experience for mobile and managing user flows.
‘Everyday’s an Open Day’ was the concept which lead to a virtual tour. It has been a while in the making - tell me a bit more about the process from initial concept to what we have now.
We were given the task of re-defining the Waverley College brand across all touchpoints to promote the College to prospective students and parents. The overarching creative idea we came up with was ‘Everyday’s an Open Day’. The annual Open Day was traditionally the only opportunity a prospective parent or student had to visit the College and experience a regular day at the College. However, what we discovered through extensive research, was that parents and students were doing much of their research into future schooling online – therefore their minds were often made up before the Open Day came around. We didn’t want to miss an opportunity to connect with them.
So we came up with the idea of bringing the Open Day to their screens and devising a virtual tour where the users can explore at their own pace any day of the year. At each location throughout the school they can be immersed in content relevant to that location, whether that be a real conversation between a student and teacher, a video of an event, an article from the College archives or immersive 360s showcasing the facilities.
I really enjoy looking through the tour on a mobile device especially the interactive 360s. With so many people visiting the site on mobile its really nice to give them a unique experience based on their device. How have you found working between devices while still managing a coherent user flow?
We were very aware of the amount of users visiting the site on their mobile so we wanted the tour to be just as engaging as it is on a desktop. The team at Multiple States not only made the experience work, they cleverly re-worked the content so that the mobile actually enhanced the user experience. The 360s for example were initially only meant for desktop, however when challenged to make them work on mobile, we came back with a whole new experience that resembled virtual reality, where the image moves with you. We were so pleased with the result.
The tour is so simple to use but also very immersive with some outstanding content. Can you tell us how your processes such as user testing helped to refine this experience.
It is very simple, but do not be fooled, there is a lot of content within this tour! We were lucky that we had been uploading an array of content to the main site over the 2 years prior to starting the tour build. So we had a wealth of very well organised articles, photos and videos to pick and choose from that was relevant to each location. There was still a lot of work that needed to be done however, in particular gathering photos and drone footage of every angle of the College.
Once we had built the tour to a certain level of complexity we sent the link out to a select group for feedback. These were mostly users that knew the College inside-out so it was crucial to get their input. Features which are now integral to the tour such as ‘Next Location’ and ‘All locations’ were results of this feedback. It was great that the client was so open to asking for feedback and allowing us to take the time to implement it.
Credits
- Design & Development - Kevin Beck
- Branding & Design - Rachelle Blake
- Development - Chris Corby
- Design & Development - Will McLean