Re-thinking the online experience at this leading New England aquarium

Made Media partnered with Mystic Aquarium in 2022 to reimagine their digital ticketing experience in a post-COVID world. The new site would support the science, research, and education mission of the organization while providing a positive first interaction with the Mystic Aquarium brand when purchasing timed-entry tickets.

The scope of the project was the full website and booking path. The Made Media design team worked with Mystic Aquarium through a user experience and information architecture design process to determine the structure and layout of the new site. The team also presented a number of potential design concepts for the visual design, which were iterated over several rounds with feedback from Mystic Aquarium stakeholders.

Mystic was already using Tessitura ticketing and CRM software to process ticketing and membership transactions, and using Tessitura Network Express Web (TNEW) as its core e-commerce path. As the checkout path was working well for the Aquarium, we focused on designing and building a hybrid integration with the Tessitura API that would allow users to plan their day, selecting the date/time of their visit, how many tickets, and applying offers/up-sells, before redirecting to TNEW for checkout.

Alongside the ticketing integration work, Made developers built the new website on top of our preferred open source Silverstripe content management system, preparing a data structure in the CMS that would feed both the new website, and following a subsequent release, on-site display screens showing information about today’s events.