Clock Limited Kings Langley

ABOUT

Clock is an award-winning digital agency of 20 years, delivering digital exceptional experiences for our clients and their customers. We worked with Leicester Tigers, the English Premiership’s most successful professional rugby club, to deliver a new benchmark for professional sports club websites.

The aim of the project was to design and build a new Leicester Tigers website, fit for purpose and fitting of a club as prestigious as Leicester Tigers. The goal of the new website was to find the common ground between a great user experience for fans and the commercial goals of the club. The new site delivers on both aspects. Firstly, as the results have shown, it has been a resounding success with fans who have given it a huge thumbs up. And for Leicester Tigers as a business, the site has delivered and continues to deliver more traffic than ever before to sell the club’s inventory which includes; tickets, rugby camps, merchandise.

Leicester Tigers, like many professional rugby clubs in UK, had a dated club site that had grown organically over time and eventually became amorphous. As a fan coming to their site, the first experience was a splash page to enter the main site. Once on the homepage, fans were confronted with a vast swathe of content, presented in a way that prevented the user from finding the things they wanted to find, and quickly.

Leicester Tigers asked Clock to pitch our vision for the new site. We challenged the brief with a bold approach that aimed to help bring the look and feel as well as the content hierarchy into a state that ensured the focus was on the user’s needs.

THE CHALLENGE
Leicester Tigers had an outdated website with poor functionality, and was not responsive. It fulfilled neither the key goals of offering a great fan experience nor helped in driving ticket sales, and there were two separate websites (desktop & mobile).

The vision for Leicester Tigers was to create a new home which reflected their status as being a leading club. It’s a site designed for the fans first.

Our main objective was to deliver a slick, new and fast responsive website which emphasised the premium brand nature of Leicester Tigers, whilst giving visitors and fans a seamless user journey that will encourage repeat visits, engagement and ultimately ticket purchases.

WHAT WE DID
Team talks and vision
The aim of the new platform was not just to support the fans needs, but to focus on the entire business, from facilitating the workflows of content editors updating the website; to enhancing the experience for users who wish to purchase corporate and hospitality services. So we started with the fans first.

We went to Leicester Tigers home games to conduct interviews and surveys with fans directly that allowed us to get a real sense of the likes, dislikes, frustrations and challenges of the existing digital estate. We also wanted to get a sense of the editorial management, not just day-to-day but particularly on a matchday. This discovery phase allowed us to feed into the workshops with the Tigers team that were conducted at the start of the project and allowed us to crystallise the vision for the new website.

Design and UX
The new homepage was designed to maximise the immediately viewable real estate on desktop and tablet and to give fans everything they need at first glance - before they even have to start scrolling; from the latest news, current campaign information, league standing, fixtures and of course the opportunity to buy tickets.

The responsive design ensured that the mobile experience is every bit as good and quick as the desktop and tablet version.

We leveraged the strength of Tiger’s photography by opting for a portrait representation of imagery. Where most websites will use landscape images, this unorthodox approach really helped to emphasise the action shots and gameplay footage synonymous with the game of rugby.


MX - Matchday Experience
The biggest innovation is the matchday experience. A cutting-edge Content Management System allows the Tigers team to metamorphosize the homepage into the most comprehensive reporting channel come match day, Matchday Live, thus allowing them to compete with regional news channels such as BBC.

Matchday Live integrates with OPTA and Premiership Rugby feeds as well as social channels meaning that fans now experience a more immersive and smarter platform, from all the latest news stories, behind-the-scenes footage, access to real-time stats and commentary come matchday.

The Need for Speed
The importance of website speed can not be underestimated. Slow loading websites impact on user experience and increase likelihood of users bouncing off the page. We built the site to mitigate this potential problem using cutting-edge technology.
First Meaningful Paint is the metric used to measure meaningful content loaded, not just a logo. Leicester Tigers website officially tops the speed charts versus other Premiership rugby sites. The result? Leicester Tigers are already starting to see more repeat users of the site, lower bounce rate and higher ticket sales.

RESULTS - THE FINAL SCORE

The new Leicester Tigers website is fulfilling the business goals. It is driving traffic, thanks to clear call to action.

As well as showing satisfaction through the increased website usage statistics, we conducted a fan survey post launch (130 respondents) - “What mark out of ten would you give the new website?” Average score 8.9/10

First Meaningful Paint: Metric used to measure page load speed. Leicester Tigers website is the fastest rugby website that was tested.

AWARDS

W3 Award

Annual 2018 ShortlistLeicester Tigers WebsiteWeb

Leicester Tigers Website

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