Helping the British Olympic Association improve website conversion and increase sales for an exclusive VIP event at the Paris 2024 Olympics. 

Team GB is a brand name used by the British Olympic Association (BOA) since 1999 for the British Olympic team.

Ahead of the Paris 2024 olympics, the client wanted to capture the excitement of the games by hosting VIP events each evening of the games to bring supporters and GB heroes together in a venue known as Team GB house.

Available tickets would be sold for each of the 17 days of the Paris 2024 Olympics featuring star guests and live music.

I helped to audit and re-design the GB House website and purchase journey.

I worked closely with the web team and Chief Finance Officer (CFO) at Team GB as well as a 3rd party consultancy who were brought in to help develop a new microsite specifically for Team GB House.

Team GB wanted to accelerate the rate of ticket sales in the run up to the games and wanted to understand how the website could be optimised to do so.

This was due to, in part, with issues of the design of their website and in particular the purchase journey, which looked dated and didn't give confidence to the customer. 

After an initial consultation, I provided the client with a report of all the areas I could see across the site as well estimated impact vs. effort.

The audit was based on my experience as a digital designer working in e-commerce, as well as accepted good practice and design convention. 

Following the initial consultation I was asked to continue to support the team by auditing the site and help to offer tactical and strategic design solutions which would increase conversions of customers through the site and drive ticket sales. 

The initial proposal looked at the website overall and proposed some 'quick-wins' based on which changes would provide the most customer benefit.

Link to report (opens in new tab)

I created the above report and link to some Figma design below to help illustrate what a potential improve site and customer journey may look like (on mobile).

Some of the quick-wins documented were:

• Consistent styling to be used from main site to purchase journey included Typography, colour palette and icons used

• Move landing page text 'above the fold' to catch users' attention

• Change line height to 1.5 x text height to improve legibility for customers

Scan the QR code to open Figma on your mobile Steps to use the prototype:

• Browse the home page before tapping Buy tickets

• Tap from date, then tap the calendar to select the From range

• Scroll down and tap View more to see expanded view of each day

• Tap Select on Saturday 27th July

• Swipe down to view page you can View details to see what each package gives you

N.B. - GB badge (top left) navigates home.

Constraints meant that the website would need to be split between the initial landing and product pages and the checkout.

However, to make the journey feel seamless for the user, I suggested that some pages should be merged and simplified to create less steps and friction when purchasing.

The concept for Team GB House, wasn't typical of an e-commerce website. Instead, the positioning of the pop-up VIP site was more akin to an event, such as a multi-day sporting event or music festival. 

As such, these sites were reviewed to understand how they sold the event to visitors of the site and what were the key messages that they wanted to get across such as:

• Date

• Cost

• What to expect

• Create excitement

Many sporting and sporting events were reviewed, including music events such as Coachella and Notting Hill Carnival, shown below. 

The original site was laid out in full and reviewed to establish where there where improvements could and should be made.

They were rated based on the perceived severity to users in terms of 'Would the customer be able to complete the journey of purchasing a ticket?' if things stayed the same.

The ratings given were:

• high (red)

• medium (amber)

• low (green)

Below are the previous designs viewed on mobile. Some of the obvious problems consisted of:

• Difficult to view on mobile, text size rendering too small

• Images not optimised for responsive design

• Checkout and basket views difficult to see what the user had selected

Following the initial audit, I then had a round of meetings with Team GB and the agency developign the site. We worked systematically to make improvements to the new site that was created. 

Examples of the design iterations were as follows:

This landing page initially showed great images, but was lacking in clear compelling copy which would allow the user to take action. 

Design iterations for the landing page included suggestions for:

• Compelling, clear copy to allow the user to take action

• Include a date to immediately suggest the idea of this being an 'event' for a set period of time

• Bring the copy 'above the fold', show options of ticket packages immediately below and allow the text to be set against a strongly contrasting background, as opposed to overlayed against the images which was causing readability issues

The individual product pages described the events that were taking place for each day and what could be expected in the evening.

We wanted to drive users first to a very clear itinerary page, showing the tickets to be purchased by date, with flexibility to search packages by date, price and sport to allow for different customer types.

Each 'card' was then clearly labelled with the date in a clear, consistent format, the times, events, location and price, with the user able to select that 'product'. 

The old checkout journey was in need of serious modernisation. A poor checkout experience can reduce trust significantly and prevent the customer from getting over the last hurdle in the overall purchase journey.

I looked at some of great examples from Shopify websites and respected retailers such as John Lewis to put forward a checkout journey which removed friction through the use of 'guest checkout' option and improved transparency by presenting any additional fees upfront allowign the user to always see what was in their basket, improving trust and clarity further.

Initial feedback from users showed that the new designs had vastly improved the experience, both in terms of speed through the purchase journey and clarity of information that was being shown about the event.

This naturally helped customers confidence in purchase decision making and saw an increase in ticket sales as anticipated.  

Further marketing efforts through the Daily Mail media and Heart radio also helped to market Team GB House further and faster and led to a successful campaign overall for the Team GB House and the Paris 2024 Olympics.

The Team GB House site has fulfilled it's purpose for Paris 2024 and now taken down, though Team GB continue to have a year round sales website shop.teamgb.com