Creating user centric design through deep exploration of RZSS’s users and their needs

The Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) is long established, having operated in Scotland for well over one hundred years as a wildlife conservation charity. They are responsible for Edinburgh Zoo and The Highland Wildlife Park, which provide gateways for members of the public to access animals, the natural world and to understand the importance of conservation. Key to their longevity and success is being able to adapt and remain salient, and engaged in people’s lives. Their websites are essential in maintaining and building on the RZSS success now and in the future. The Union group was tasked with building three new websites for RZSS, Edinburgh Zoo and the Highland Wildlife park; as part of this Union Insight had the responsibility of delivering qualitative research to understand all the different audiences that engage and use the three websites. 

We approached this piece of work over two stages to ensure we understood the complex range of audiences from the point of view of internal stakeholders, before then engaging with these different groups to garner in-depth understanding of them, their needs and experiences of the current websites. A challenging budget played an important role in shaping an approach where we utilised internal stakeholders expertise and knowledge to initially build a picture of audiences and their needs before speaking to the audiences to refine and add depth to understanding. 

Stage 1 involved two group workshop sessions with key internal stakeholders covering all aspects of RZSS from research and science to marketing and visitor gift shop staff. Before attending we tasked each participant with completing a short pre-task detailing who they believed were key audiences, their motivations for using the website, their needs and pain points. We then used the workshop sessions , to explore each of these audiences in detail and map out all the various groups. 

Stage 2 built on understanding from the workshops by conducting online remote in-depth interviews with the various identified key audiences. These on-to-one sessions explored perceptions, motivations & barriers, the current website(s) and competitor websites. In-depth interviews are ideal for user research as they allow individual exploration of needs, behaviours, customer journeys and experiences. 

The output was fed into the strategy, design, development and implementation of three new RZSS websites. The learnings from this work were essential in shaping solutions that had user needs at the center of each website.