Ark
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew – Website to enhance the experience of Temperate House glasshouse visitors
2018 – 2023
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is an internationally important botanical research and education institution working to understand and protect plants and fungi, for the wellbeing of people and all life on Earth.
Visitors to the Temperate House are able to view 1,200 different species of plants from across the world. We worked with Kew to build a website that visitors could access on their smartphones, with quick access to plant types provided by QR codes on signage.
Enhancing the visitor experience
We worked with the team at Kew to identify a range of user stories across their audience groups. The website needed to serve people researching plants remotely as well as those wanting to find out more after a visit.
However, the main purpose of the website was to enrich the experience of people during their visit. To support this, QR codes were added to information panels next to particular plants. Users could scan the codes and be taken to detailed information on their smartphone. Fast wifi was available throughout the site to support this.
An accessible directory of hundreds of plants
The website structure allowed visitors to explore information about the plants in more detail. For each plant, various attributes were recorded such as where and how they grow, if they were endangered and details on their uses for purposes such as medicine. There was also information about seed storage and related plants. This was all supported visually by high-quality photography from Kew’s extensive archive.
All of the individual plant information was collated into a directory with multiple filtering options. Regional pages provided an additional organising principle and layer of information. The majority of the design was carried out by Kew’s internal team and we worked with them to translate their vision into a built website.
The website was live for around four years, but has now been subsumed into the main Kew website following a decision to consolidate their digital estate.
Bureau were brilliant to work with on this project. We had a lot to deliver and tight deadlines – they were really collaborative and helped us find elegant yet pragmatic solutions to the problems we needed to solve, helping us launch the site in time for our opening event. We would absolutely work with them again and happily recommend them to others.