As one of the UK’s best-loved gardens and the flagship for the RHS, they receive around 1 million visitors each year.

Although their website was receiving traffic, this wasn't always converting to footfall at Wisley. That's where we came in.

We wanted to create something to reflect the enormity of these wonderful gardens and excite people to plan a visit.

Wanting to move away from your standard PDF or static image map, we focused our attention on creating something interactive, that people could explore and find out more about what the garden has to offer. 

Design wise, we wanted to create something that people would enjoy using, as well as a tool to learn more about the garden. Our design team visited Wisley on a number of occasions, as well as taking photographs and studying aerial shots, so the final design would really reflect the garden.

We wanted the visual aspect to be contemporary but avoid looking cartoony or childish. A combination of hand drawn and graphic geometric elements were used to create a modern and individual look.

With the sheer scale of the garden, and therefore the design, the loading speed of the site was something we needed to tackle. Adding a ‘loading’ screen was essential to keep the experience as consistent as possible.

We wanted the users experience to be simple, smooth and immersive. For this we used a zoomed version of the map with click/touch and drag navigation, with a ‘minimap’ and a scale to prevent the user feeling lost. To make sure this wasn’t just your average map, we added points of interest pop ups, which give more information on all the features in the garden and creates that interactive feel we were looking for.

Our original brief was to “excite people to want to attend”and this has been achieved, with the average time on the page up 250% and an increase in footfall.

With Wisley safety mapped out, we’re now turning our attention to the other RHS gardens.

View the map here: https://www.rhs.org.uk/gardens/wisley/map