Goal: Elevate and centralize communications around cherry blossoms by developing a dedicated website.
Project overview
We wanted to bring together all of the various pieces of content and communication around cherry blossom season together to create a one stop shop website for campus visitors during the blossom season. The site would also serve as a jumping off point to related content from other partners.
Project launch date: March 9, 2023
Length of project: Roughly three to four months
Project elements
Content audit
A content audit was done to determine what cherry blossom assets already existed across a variety of UW channels, including UW News and UW Facilities. Knowing what content already existed and where helped to better determine how to layout the new site. With various campus partners delivering a wide variety of assets, we needed to know which information we could deliver via this centralized platform and which information we needed to provide pathways to instead.
Meetings with colleagues on other teams, like the social media team, helped to better understand what they planned on doing for cherry blossom season and the best way to support those goals. One of the key goals that surfaced was determining the best way to incorporate parking and transportation information.
Ideation
While a formal competitive analysis wasn’t done for this project, we did review several sites to get inspiration for the best ways to organize and deliver out content. One of those sites, for the National Cherry Blossom Festival, had a ‘Bloom Watch’ featured on their site. This, coupled with what we knew about our previous bloom seasons and our content audit, showed us just how important it was to let visitors know when to come enjoy the bloom. Having a bloom tracker of our own somewhere on the site became a priority for this initial launch.
The use of pink throughout the other designs we saw also showed an opportunity to potentially expand our regular color palette in an intentional way that made sense. Another fun idea came from seeing the snowfall effect on Taylor Swift’s 2022 merch storefront. Knowing that the timeline and bandwidth didn’t allow for this particular feature, the concept of having cherry blossom petals fall in a similar manner on the site was added to our potential future feature list.
Sitemapping
While planning the information architecture for this site, we kept in mind the main goal of providing clear visitor information as well as weaving in popular content pieces like a link to the live cam.
After collaborating further with other project members, the proposed navigation was paired down and refined based on bandwidth and workload as well as some strategic considerations with outside partners that was shared. Some elements, like the ‘Behind the blossoms’ page, were shelved for future iterations of the site.
Wireframing/prototyping
We sketched out our initial concepts for the cherry blossom homepage, figuring out the best way to execute a bloom tracker of some kind with the theme and technology available to us. The beginning designs also kept in mind providing a pathway to our social media channel that we wanted to feature within the bloom tracker section. A three-card set leading to resources that users could leverage to visit the blossoms was also included, along with a social media feature of some kind towards the bottom of the site.
We then converted the concepts into a mid-fidelity wireframe. The content order had a video header to provide more of a visual element followed by a bloom watch, the three-card ‘Visiting the blossoms’ section, a ‘Learn more’ history section with the concept to lead to an already existing history article and ending with a photo gallery or social media feature of some kind. The ‘Bloom Watch’ design leveraged using an illustrated tree image that could be easily swapped out with other images of the tree at different blooming stages. This, coupled with standardized text to accompany it, meant that as the cherry trees moved through their blossom cycles during the season we could easily swap to the next stage without having to illustrate a new image or write new copy. It also eliminated any development work needed if the bloom tracker had been a coded element instead which helped us meet our project deadline.
After getting feedback, some of the changes we made included making the header a static image instead of a video due to theme limitations and some rearranging of the bloom watch section. The pink elements, which had been mocked up as an example in the history section, were shelved for future iterations of the site to give more time for brand strategy and theme development.
A set of three cards was added to the bottom of the homepage to provide pathways to the UW Botanic Gardens, the U District Cherry Blossom Festival website and a link to where the University Book Store sells cherry blossom themed merchandise. Some of these content pieces were originally in the proposed navigation but were relocated for a variety of reasons.
Project launch
The cherry blossom website launched just in time for the 2023 bloom season, with the homepage getting nearly 200,000 views from nearly 200,000 users by end of April 2023 and the parking and transportation page getting nearly 35,000 views from a little over 22,000 users. The multiple pathways provided to the live cam were particularly popular, with over 80,000 user sessions going from the cherry blossom site to the live cam.
Leveraging the beauty of the cherry blossoms, the website not only serves its purpose but is set up to be flexible and grow for years to come. Bringing all of the parking and transportation information together in one place in particular provides a clear, centralized location for that content to visitors.
**Use the wayback machine to view the cherry blossoms site when it first launched in March 2023.