A multi-brand transformation of the user experience.

Challenge

The Royal Agricultural Society of NSW (RAS) was set up to improve food standards in Australia. Under its umbrella are the Sydney Royal Easter Show (an annual celebration of the role of agriculture in our nation, complete with food stalls, carnival rides and animal exhibits) and Sydney Showground (a venue and event management space). The Competition Administration System (CAS) is a portal for those entering RAS competitions, such as farmers and florists.

Sudo Roux has been working on a multi-year transformation of the brands, which were all being held back by outdated, badly maintained websites. The Easter Show welcomes almost a million guests a year, which proves difficult with a web presence that lacks software currency and hasn’t been updated for over 7 years.

This set-and-forget mentality was causing problems for the Royal Agricultural Society of NSW and its child companies. Continuing the work we’ve already done, we needed to align across the business for user and brand consistency, and improve the experience for both our clients and their visitors.

Solution

From a user perspective, we created a front end that was clean and easy to navigate.

For our client, we built a consistent framework for use across all websites. They could use this to author things quickly and autonomously, and to easily access everything they need.

Royal Agricultural Society of NSW

A 7-year build-up of website content meant users had to wade through lots of unnecessary pages to find what they needed. We consolidated, streamlined and cleaned up the content, only keeping the useful pages to make the site easier to navigate.

A big part of the RAS is to open up competitions to its users. We streamlined the competition entry process to make it easier for users to find and enter competitions, with an improved IA that enabled:

• A re-categorisation of some of the competitions
• New filtering
• Improved search functionality
• A cohesive experience for users even if staff in the business work in silos
• Each competition to have its own dedicated page or “hub”, giving return users easy access to things like results and key dates

A HubSpot integration provided a holistic view of each contact and their journey with the RAS. We fed Expressions of Interest and subscription forms into the CRM, where automations tag and sort each entry to make sure every user receives the right comms.

RAS aims to move towards a 365-day-a-year operation. To help, we decided to hero their events on the homepage, shining a light on more than just the Easter Show. From Comic Con to Grape, Grain & Graze (a wine-tasting event) and farm day excursions for schools, we set out to showcase the breadth of venues and diversity of events on offer.

Competition Administration System

Even the most seasoned competitor can get overwhelmed by the entry registration process. The amount of information required is substantial–especially where animals are involved.

CAS is a custom platform that has benefitted from continual upgrades from an IT professional’s perspective, but not from a user perspective. Overall, we created a more connected and streamlined experience from website to portal, and a more straightforward way for users to enter competitions.

By following the same design framework we developed for the rest of the business, we looked at journey mapping and user flow to find the best way of displaying the necessary information to each user. Alongside this, we designed a dashboard to display notifications, putting the focus on actions that need to be addressed, such as when a payment or more information is needed.

Overall, this created a more connected and streamlined experience from website to portal, and a more straightforward way for users to enter competitions.

Sydney Showground

With a focus on selling venue space beyond the 2-week Royal Easter Show period, the Sydney Showground website needed to make it easy for each user to complete their goals. Organisers want to find a fit-for-purpose venue, exhibitors want operational details, visitors want to browse events.

We incorporated the following features to make that happen:

• An easy-to-navigate, non-intrusive venue search bar for users
• Toolkits with information about health and safety, marketing and operations for organisers
• Downloadable images for organisers to share with their boss for easier sign-off on a space
• Simpler ways for organisers to select the perfect venue, including walkable 360-degree tours showing venues in multiple modes. We also improved filtering capabilities, so users can now search by capacity and by square metre

Sydney Royal Easter Show

The Easter Show became the first piece of the multi-year transformation. A rite of passage for Sydneysiders, the show had a rich history but was stuck in the past.

We needed to switch the focus to the experience of the user base (which happened to be ⅕ of the size of Sydney). We integrated a CRM and marketing automation strategy so the client could understand their customers on a personal level. With the right insights, we were able to create tailored customer journeys designed to help each user reach their destination with ease.

We opted for:

• A mobile-first approach
• Search engine optimisation
• GA4 implementation
• Website redesign and rebuild
• An opti-environment upgrade
• User-friendly, “everything-in-a-box” software 
• Scalable design systems for the client to author their own content
• Wayfinding capabilities 

Activation

The initial scope of this project was to improve the IA and UX but didn’t touch on new features. We decided that the best way to improve the user experience was to bring in features that never existed in the old websites, creating straighter, shorter lines for users to get to their destination.

The old-school sites were offputting. Our custom design frameworks meant the client could easily manage their own content moving forward. This created a better UX and time savings for them as well as their users.