Driving a new digital era for London Transport Museum

About the Client

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.

Quick Results

Business Challenge

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.

Collections Online

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.

Hidden Online

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.

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Entry and Ticketing

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.

Drupal Platform

We selected Drupal as the platform for the job. Secure, stable... Actually. We'll let Laura Say, Digital Marketing Manager at London Transport Museum tell you why it's great:

Technically, the choice of Drupal, along with CTI Digital's expertise, has meant we have been able to build and integrate complex systems for the first time, such as our new Events calendar, integrated Donate, Blog and News functionality and our Collections database.

This, as well as the flexible templates, mean that we've been able to deliver a website that meets the complex needs from the Museum and allows users to seamlessly navigate all aspects of what we offer.

CTI Digital have been an essential part in delivering this new integrated approach and we're excited to continue working with them to enhance our digital presence further and continue to bring London's transport history to life.

Quality Assurance

All of our projects undergo rigorous testing, throughout the software development process. In order to deliver the utmost quality for clients and their respective users, our in-house QA team ensure that all end products perform accurately and reliably under normal and abnormal conditions. Testing is followed by continual monitoring of software performance, to prevent reoccurrence of any issues and to ensure efficient ongoing operation.

As such, we were able to confidently deliver a well-designed, scalable and technically stable result.

Having a new and improved website is a complete game-changer for the Museum as it has allowed us to bring our collection and its fascinating stories to a global audience with an improved user experience and focus on rich, searchable, shareable content.

Previously, we had a number of disparate websites with little integration in place between them and no cohesive digital roadmap. Now, with the help of the CTI Digital team, we have taken a huge step forward with our digital ambitions.

Harriet Burke, Head of Digital Marketing at London Transport Museum

Results

This project has won two awards at the NYX Marcomms Award 2021 and an awards at the UK Dev Awards 2022.

NYX Marcomms Award

The NYX Marcomms Awards is an International Award Association programme honouring creative excellence in digital, marketing and communications.

More than 1,000 marketing, design, print, video, and digital production entries were submitted from over 50 countries worldwide!

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Gold for 'Best User Experience'

 

 

Silver in the 'Best Website' category.

 

 

UK Dev Awards 

The UK Dev Awards showcase all things digital. They are a celebration of the teams that communicate digitally to grow business – the UX people, the technical SEO/PPC teams, the content writers and the marketers. The Awards belong to those of you who are optimising user experiences, improving accessibility and smashing technological limitations.

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WINNER of the Best Third Sector of the Year award for work with the London Transport Museum.