Global Village

Setting the standards for the world’s leading multicultural festival park through digitally-enriching experiences.

Background

Global Village is the region's largest multicultural theme park and is one of the go-to destinations for families in the region. Created in 1997 and covering 1.6 million sqm, Global Village welcomes 7 million guests every season and is home to 500+ retail and commercial outlets, 200+ dining areas and a one-stop-shop for entertainment and rides, taking customers on a journey across the world, uniting cultures and creating wonder.

‍

Business need

The objective of Global Village was to relaunch an improved digital experience for their guests as well as the business-facing portals before they reopened for their 25th silver anniversary.

‍

Approach

Based on their extensive offerings and activities, we set out to design and build the best possible user experience for both B2C and B2B audiences on their website and app.

Our goal was to understand the business requirements, the users (both B2B and B2C), and any technology limitations, to ensure that we aligned with business expectations. Most importantly, we established success criteria and project goals to measure the project success.

We took a deep dive into the different types of user groups in B2C and B2B to help us fully understand the different scenarios to design for and ensure that the customer journeys had been considered to guide and optimise the best possible experiences online.

B2C users were predominantly residents from particular demographics, and their behaviour was to go back to Global Village each year, while before the redesign, B2B users had a fragmented approach to finding information.

‍‍We created low-fidelity grayscale wireframes to depict the expected content and users flows. The wireframes were used to understand and map out the entire user experience and edge cases and the majority of the changes were made in this sub-phase before it went to UI for refinement and the development handover.

During the design direction, the UI designers created multiple styles and aesthetics to adapt to the difference user groups and created a customised icon library with UI components for all the platforms, including Arabic templates for the development team.

‍
The development team created a fully responsive website with login states and a profile management dashboard, as well as developed a natively app in iOS and Android. Throughout the development stage, we offered UX and UI support, further evaluating the flows with A/B tests.

‍

Outcome

It took a full stack team to design and develop an innovative and optimal experience that spanned over 4 months. We worked within a tight time frame to get the fully functional website launched before the 25th Silver celebration opening day, with 2 months of discovery, definition and design, and around 2 months for development, QA and optimisations.

We reaped the rewards as the Global Village mobile app won 3 Jubilee Awards, resulted in a growth of 100% online tickets with over 33 000 new users in the first 3 months of the new launch, and a 167% increase in app downloads.

‍

For B2C

We took the B2C product from functional to engaging and added loads of innovative new features.

‍

For B2B

We fully digitised the application processes and profile management experiences dynamically and contextually based on the scenarios of the B2B users.

‍