DK Readers was a hugely popular readers series of 130 books (and growing) which was given a big rebrand and refresh in 2023, now named DK Super Readers the books with fresh look, they needed a home and way to view and filter by level and age group, that’s where this site came in. As well as being view all books in the series and being able to filter by level, age group and topic, additional free content was also made available to help educators alongside the books.
DK Learning is DK’s educator-facing website, the core aims of the site are:
Provide educators (predominantly in the UK and US) with a way of finding DK books and resources, such as downloads and lesson plans aligned to curriculum, topic and subject, filterable by key stage / grade
Provide DK with a way to start to create a community and talk directly to educators about their needs and identify opportunities for future initiatives
A companion content virtual experience accessed via a QR code in the book. The aim of the experience is to provide an immersive example garden that helps communicate some of the key principles behind climate-change conscious gardening. View the virtual garden.
The aim of the Quidditch World Cup concept was to take existing writing by J.K. Rowling and re-imagine it as an interactive storytelling piece. Adding illustrations, interactions, audio samples form the newly released audiobook. Giving the fans the opportunity to experience the writing in a new way, hear some of the audiobook and go on to buy it.
Previous to the redesign the homepage was a very minimal full screen carousel with 6 - 8 slides linking to various content with the most recent being displayed and linked to from slide 1. This presented a multitude of problems, both from user and business perspectives. The main business issues were not being able to comminicate the offering very well, and not being able to surface and link to content prominently for longer than a day, because once a story or feature had been in position one for a day it would move off an get buried, well moved to slide 2, which virtually no one would view let alone click (and let's face it who likes carousels!?), the main issue for users was not being able to get a picture of all the latest content and an overview of the offering and only seeing a single slide, because they wouldn't click to 2 and beyond (and let's face it who likes carousels!?).
The solution involved removing the carousel and implementing a longer scrolling page that could accommodate and surface both current news and articles, interactive features, other less event-specific content and products.
Hogwarts is a place close to the heart of all fans of Harry Potter. In 2017 to celebrate the 1st September, the day when all wizards in training go back to Hogwarts, we created a web based 3d interactive experience, allowing fans to explore the castle, the Quidditch pitch and the Forbidden Forest, uncovering content hotspots that reveal information about from the story and how it relates to that area of the grounds. For more of the technical detail of the build, see this post.
The concept behind the Wizarding World Book Club was to provide an online social book club celebrating the 20th anniversary of the publication of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone where new readers and re-readers could read all seven stories and discuss the various themes that come up through the series. The site provided a launch pad into those themes, with thought starters and capturing the highlights from the discussions. Book Club members also had the opportunity to acquire awards for completing various tasks.
J.K. Rowling promised fans of Harry Potter a "quiz" that would tell them which animal form their Patronus would take if they were a wizard (and obviously skilled enough to cast a Patronus) so the pressure was on to deliver an experience that exceeded their expectations. I think we achieved that. Produced using WebGL and threeJS in combination with an algorithm produced by J.K. Rowling herself the experience was hugely popular delivering Patronuses to of millions of users and driving huge growth in registered users, as well as some slightly strange memes, causing it to trend for a good few hours. Find out more on the technical side of the build. It was paramount that there was a seamless user journey and that this was accessible to all users regardless of whether their device/browser supported WebGL, or whether they used a screen reader, in order to deliver this we created a fallback version for older devices and enabled screen reader controls to include as much of the audience as possible.
As a way of increasing dwell time and user engagement, we introduced interactive infographics and storytelling pieces which bring creative elements to life through interactivity. The Life and Times of Albus Dumbledore and A guide to Voldemort's Death Eaters are examples of pieces authored, edited, uploaded and published by the Creative and Editorial teams without the need for any development, reducing the cost and time to create and publish compelling, visually rich content.
Who doesn't like a taking a quiz and testing our knowledge of a subject we feel we know pretty well?
A low cost, low effort way of driving large numbers of session and repeat engagement, giving users the opportunity to challenge themselves to see how much they actually know about the Wizarding World, and of course the ability to brag about it on social!
To coincide with the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, we released a sorting experience to let users discover which Ilvermorny (the North American Hogwarts) house they would be sorted into.
Previous to the redesign and rebuild, Rough Guides' online presence didn't do the brand justice. Poorly designed, difficult to navigate, with an unusable CMS that only made a tiny proportion of the content editable, and all of the great travel content was more or less invisible to Google.
The redesign gave Rough Guides a website that reflected its brand values and presented its content in a compelling way providing a much better user experience. Inspirational travel imagery, intuitive navigation and search, great SEO, and a direct to consumer digital ecommerce channel all resulted in page views and session initially doubling and continuing to grow post launch.
