Copenhagen Municipality.

Relaunch of Copenhagen Municipalities’ online culture and event universe.

Copenhagen municipality has an ambition of being an international metropolis for life quality and growth, where culture and leisure life bear the mark of high quality and social inclusion. The culture and leisure life abounds from art shows, concerts and markets, to sports and association offers, where volunteer enthusiasts and associations are key people in the development of Copenhagen city, as a vibrant city with an edge.

In context to the above mentioned, the municipality entered into a collaboration with Kruso, with the purpose of designing and developing a new online event universe as a central and integrated part of inspiration searches and bookings of culture and leisure life arrangements for citizens and visitors of Copenhagen city.

december 2021

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Horizontal + vertical further development of "Future Web Platform" in Drupal 9

The event universe has been developed as one of 6 parallel project tracks under the project name "Future Web Platform". An overall relaunch project for the City of Copenhagen's web platform. The vision for the overall project was to develop a new, flexible modular web architecture, which would ensure a simple and up-to-date user experience in the presentation layer. At the same time, its purpose was to give the municipality's many hundreds of web editors both support and freedom to produce and maintain content via intuitive workflows in Drupal CMS.

Krusos development work should be based on a partly completed design and module system. It was a success criterion for Krusos design team who was able to find the right balance between vertical and further development of already existent modules with a focus on reusing as many micro-interactions principles as possible. At the same time, the team focused on reusable horizontal development of completely new concepts in regard to economical and development haste.

A design for inspiration

Unlike the service-oriented sites, where more or less focused citizens seek effective goal fulfilment, the new event platform should support exploratory user journeys, driven by curiosity and inspiration-seeking. For the design task, this meant that the concept development of e.g. list and calendar views, solutions had to find solutions that could facilitate clarity and immediate action - and at the same time inspire users and stimulate their desire to explore and move across the municipality's comprehensive catalogue of cultural and leisure activities.

Iterative, mobile-first design approach

The design development was completed via an iterative sprint, where hypothesis, problem definitions and concepts were developed, tested and refined. The test took place via internet subject matter experts with the municipality itself, and via a broad composite citizen panel of end-users with different prerequisites, recruited by the City of Copenhagen based on high-fi interactive prototypes. This access gave the design team and the municipality the opportunity to test and quality assure partly fundamental visual logics and information architecture very early, but also specific detailed solutions such as language use and micro-interactions.

It gave the project team the freedom to experiment and find the best solutions without compromising the schedule for the technical implementation.

The prototype was based on a mobile-first approach, as the majority of cultural consumers primarily track cultural offers and experiences via mobile.

Accessibility in the forefront

In the same way, as on the citizen service-oriented pages, the culture and event area must live up to high standards for web accessibility. As an integral part of the development process, we, therefore, facilitated accessibility tests with a view to compliance with minimum WCAG 2.1 standards. This ensures that citizens with functional challenges will also be able to access and experience Copenhagen Municipality's offers in the field of culture and leisure in a user-friendly and accessible way.