Located in the heart of Covent Garden, London Transport Museum (LTM) is the world’s leading museum of urban transport. Their charitable mission is to use the story of transport to encourage, enrich, and to ignite curiosity for all Londoners and those who love the city.

The Museum’s investment in transforming its online presence is a long-term strategic decision made in 2019. Driven by the desire to simplify the customer journey, the Museum wants to increase opportunities for people to discover fascinating content about London’s transport past and present.

For the past decade, London Transport Museum has been using a principally unchanged website to bring schools, families and transport enthusiasts the latest updates on installations, exhibitions, and events.

LTM wanted to future proof the museum from a digital perspective and become a leader in the museum and cultural sector. A key aspect of the change would be removing a series of bespoke frameworks that required steep maintenance and heavy customisation.

As such, our brain-box team were appointed to deliver:

• A series of discovery and strategic workshops to uncover and refine the museum’s digital vision.

• User-experience designs. 

• A digitally inclusive Drupal platform.

• Tools to empower site managers and make content delivery simple.

More than a quarter of a million artefacts in the Museum’s collection are accessible through an enhanced elastic search, enabled by manual tagging and intention interpretive data networks. A new sliding date range search feature is also ideal for researchers of particular eras or schools focusing on precise decades.

The ‘Collections’ element of the site has been built to host multimedia content capable of showcasing detailed drawings, maps, video and audio content for rich storytelling. Drawing upon an ecommerce-like interface, specifications and key details are displayed clearly in accordions and boxes, fully accessible by keyboard and screen readers.

A new section dedicated to short-form and long-form reads gives visitors to the website the opportunity to explore different themes and topics of interest. Users can explore everything from the history of engineering to the role of women in transport and the design heritage of London’s iconic Tube map, advertising posters and moquette seating.

As a popular tourist attraction and favourite of London aficionados, London Transport Museum’s Hidden London tours allow visitors to explore ‘forgotten’ parts of the Tube network and discover London from an entirely different perspective. 

The Museum’s previous website framework limited its ability to customise content for its tours. But the new digital platform now showcases Hidden London front and centre with an immersive look and feel. This aims to increase interest and bookings for all sites displayed by location, including a new series of virtual tours, which can be enjoyed from the comfort of your sofa, as well as the award-winning Hidden London exhibition and retail range.

When the Museum reopens, live ticket updates and offers are now made available in a secondary ‘utility’ navigation, enabling people to pre-book online designated entry slots safely. When the museum reopened after the first lockdown, this feature became ever more important, designed to manage the flow of visitors to the museum and give each patron enough space and time to fully enjoy the exhibits.