NRG Park
Widening Customer Appeal.
The NRG Group approached OWDT to address their digital presence and allow us to offer design recommendations for a new website. A significant reason they were interested in revamping their current website was that it failed to depict a lively, vibrant setting – the backdrop for the endless variety of events that place at their venues. They viewed their website as too static and lifeless.
NRG Park was perceived mainly as a sporting event venue. It was important to expand this image into a venue brand that hosts a diverse range of entertainment events and experiences, widening the audience demographics. One of our visual challenges for the existing site was an inability to showcase and arrange upcoming events in a clear and immediate fashion. The overall design did not communicate the bustling energy that revolved around the parks, along with a design that hindered horizontal user growth.
Client Goals
vibrant design
improve navigation
demographically inclusive design
omni-channel expansion
uplift user experience
unite a fragmented system
create a vendor management system
redefine a large eenue experience
Insights
We had to partner with NRG Park’s internal marketing team and arrange a series of insight discovery sessions to learn more about the venue’s brand strategy. Pairing our discovery session with live user experience observations, we realized the goal was to streamline the navigational journey so that a user from any demographic or location profile could navigate the site’s events and options with ease.
Strategies
To implement this, we recommended developing a dynamic and interactive event page to showcase upcoming events and their corresponding user options which also simplified the process of in-house event management. We also found that user engagement levels were lower on various social media channels. To address these findings, we suggested creating an aggregated social media page that combined NRG Park’s accounts.
Another Big Idea
We also envisioned a dynamic FAQ page to accommodate users to easily find answers to their questions. In the event answered are not provided in the FAQ, users could submit questions using our intelligent web-application that are compiled, sent to admins to respond to, then organized and incorporated back into the FAQ page.
Tactics & Execution
OWDT had to design a site that could appeal to 5.6 million visitors, and we did. We captured the experiences taking place at their five facilities with visual appeal, user-centric design, and content organization while expressing the iconic brand. An artistic showcase was developed using the Interactive Modular Navigation Blocks (IMNB), the focal experience for users to navigate the website with ease. We also developed the Modular Event Display Tool (MEDT) for browsing upcoming events and exploring options to purchase tickets, find directions, add events to calendars, and sharing options for social media accounts. NRG Park’s social media pages were combined and integrated into the new design. And to manage the new deliverables, OWDT coded the functions into the CMS, so that regardless of technical knowledge, the marketing team could manage content self-sufficiently.
Results & Market Share
Websites are a powerful medium to impress and attract customers. This was also true for NRG Park after we gave the existing site an aesthetic and functional makeover. The style in which we showcased five different facilities using SVG animations was a microcosm of the artistic direction. The sum effect of the functional artistry was an increase in applications requesting to reserve venues. The diversity of types of events also grew. This has attracted more events to Houston, introducing further revenue to NRG Park and the local economy. NRG Park hosted the Super Bowl soon after.
Business Building
The new website reaffirmed NRG Park’s standing as Houston’s iconic venue for hosting world-class games and events. It’s difficult to find a top brand without a top-tier digital presentation that supports and conveys the internal and external principles of its operation and management. Reducing the steps and increasing time spent during the user journey allowed vendors to make reservations with greater ease, leaving a positive experience and resulting in higher overall user satisfaction. The new website has increased bookings and set the stage for future developments for the NRG Park brand.
We use the medium of web design and the principles that govern our psychology to deliberately evoke a sensory effect, persuading users to take specific actions that benefit them.
Our goal is to cultivate a multilayered communication that speaks to the responsive faculties of our being by using the domains and disciplines within content and design.