The Role of Web and App Design in Promoting Cultural Events
In Modern design, the use of web and app design for events has become a hallmark of how people interact with the world. In the new digital age, people consume more information through their devices than they ever have before which given the right strategy can produce unbelievable results. This is why it’s become imperative for all promotional events and brands to have a digital identity that gets the word out across platforms thats individual to them. In this case the Freedom Festival already has an established digital brand and design theme as seen here. In this post im going to explain some of the most important parts of Web and App Design and the role they play in promoting cultural events.
Digital Visibility and Responsiveness
Websites and apps are the primary platforms where people learn about and engage with cultural events. In fact, a recent study shows the majority of website users are now roaming on phone browsers (Howarth et al., 2023) Therefore it’s even more important a website is well-designed and responsive to all users to enhance the visibility and accessibility of these events to all who may be interested. Responsive websites also tend to keep users on the page longer, which makes sense when you consider your own experience with unresponsive or even slow-to-load websites, every second lost can lose potential visitors so it’s invaluable to a website/app that it loads quickly and is all visible to the visitor upon landing on the page.
Structure
In order for a website to truly be successful it NEEDS to get the point across effectively and preferably transfer the important information like key dates and how to get a ticket without having to dig through a bulky website or app navigation. This is where structure can play a huge part in the effectiveness of a web or app design, without the correct structure the users won’t be able to find the relevant information or even worse will scroll past it. In order to maximise the effectiveness of your structure it can help to follow the well-documented Gutenberg design diagrams and ideas as found here in a modern context (Sinha, 2021) to explain a little further the idea is that people follow a certain predictable path when scrolling a page, and as the designer you tailor the important information to appear along this path in order to increase the chance of it being read.
Social Media Integration
With social media being such a broad market home to much of the world population it’s clear to see why having sharing capabilities is an important feature for the promotion of cultural events. By making it interactable in this way you open your event up to the next level of word of mouth advertising. For example, it allows visitors to send e-invites to people they want to go with, it also allows them to share that they are going and to see if their favourite artist is going to be there in the case of the freedom festival. It has always been the most powerful form of advertising to hear about something from someone you trust therefore it would be a missed opportunity to not allow the digital community to share an event such as this.
Accessibility and Inclusivity
When it comes to a website it is incredibly important to be accessible, especially when it comes to events labelled as all inclusive like the Freedom Festival, a non accessible website negates a lot of the population from engaging or being able to read your content which can be a huge problem not only from a legal standpoint but in terms of distribution of information, the last thing an event wants is for some to not feel welcome or included in the activities. When making a website accessible it’s important to follow the principles laid out for the rest of the website for example people with screen readers should also go over the important information first just as the average visitor would, It is also important to consider colour readability for people with colour blindness so high contrast is preferential for text readability.
Citations
- Howarth, J. ITU, DataReportal (2023) Internet traffic from Mobile Devices (Oct 2023), Exploding Topics. Available at: https://explodingtopics.com/blog/mobile-internet-traffic (Accessed: 26 October 2023)
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Sinha, S. (2021) Gutenberg & Modern-day UX, Medium. Available at: https://uxdesign.cc/gutenberg-modern-day-ux-14ac545e151c (Accessed: 26 October 2023).
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For Art History and Manohari@forarthistory.org.uk (2023) Art history festival 2022, For Art History. Available at: https://forarthistory.org.uk/art-history-festival-2022/ (Accessed: 02 November 2023).
