Build something that rocks

Over the years, the Red Rocks’ brand and website evolved unintentionally into an unwieldy experience for their fans and their internal team. To understand their industry, audience, and story, we assessed current performance, developed user personas that focused on their digital pain points, and built a strategic information architecture. As we learned about their organizational goals and operations, their team shared the need to have a functional store as soon as possible, given that the summer is their most important merchandising season. Because we flagged the Red Rocks Store early on, we were able to build and launch an eCommerce microsite to serve as their online store a full year prior to the full experience.

Red Rocks didn’t have a strict brand definition, and we developed several iterations of the design without an “aha” moment. So, rather than continuing to swing and miss, we created a new Visual Identity Workshop, where their team—given direction, time, and guidance—collaborated with our designers to define the direction for the Red Rocks’ brand moving forward. Then, from that shared place of understanding, our design team regrouped, strategized, and presented the brand style guide that finally nailed the essence of Red Rocks (“aha!”).

Red Rocks means so many different things to different people. We created a design language that allows for flexibility across mediums but still feels uniquely “Red Rocks.” To create the illusion of depth in digital and echo the expansive, outdoor, rugged feeling of the amphitheatre, the design uses texture as an element. The speckled layer appears throughout the website—applied to backgrounds, text, and buttons—and also inspired the custom, bold typeface that’s now a Red Rocks’ brand staple.

Red Rocks has a lot of activities to promote—from electronic dance concerts to “Yoga on the Rocks.” To prevent content-overload, we balanced their bold branding with simple UX, giving the users more control. On the calendar and events page, users can toggle between calendar, list, and grid views, as well as filter and/or sort the content. Ad space is strategically placed throughout the site to empower the sponsorship team to earn revenue, without distracting from the overall experience.

With so much content, there was a lot of data to manage behind-the-scenes. For the backend, we diverged from a traditional WordPress install in a few areas. To get quick responses on the calendar and the archived events, we used custom REST endpoints to pull the data we needed when we needed it, and cached the results for quick execution of core website features. For some pages, we rolled a custom disk-based caching method for blocks of event data. It’s compiled on a seperate server and then distributed (via file) to the load balancer. For these pages, this removes the querying burden from the database, which can be a potential bottleneck and cause performance issues.

From the beginning of the project, accessibility was a part of the design and development decisions. An example of this in practice is the top navigation menu: it had 8 state changes throughout the experience (meaning that visually, it looked different depending on what page the user was on). Our design and development teams worked to ensure that, with the different elements, states, and platforms, the top navigation was accessible at all times. Elements were engineered to be accessible without losing their effect.

One of the biggest complaints about the user’s previous experience was the online ticketing system: it was silloued, confusing, and clunky for users to purchase a ticket. To make it a more streamlined process, we integrated the website with AXS, which included the technical integration but also the point in the experience to send users to AXS for checkout. Another insight uncovered by our customer journey map was the need to check the weather. With a widget, we have built a weather feature on the homepage. Custom icons are changed and displayed in real time (updated every 5 minutes). Other incoming integrations include Dinetime for easy reservations at the Ship Rock Grille. On an outgoing basis, the website provides the new app with webviews to seamlessly pull in content. The result, the Red Rocks team only has to manage content in one place.

Working as one team, Red Rocks and Clique brainstormed direction for visual brand identity, analyzed integration systems for development, evaluated potential CMS platforms for build. The project was successful because of the collaboration and support on both sides. It wasn’t the traditional formula of an agency delivering for a client, but the give and take of one high functioning team.