Bordeaux National Opera
A major cultural hub in France, the Opéra National de Bordeaux has been leading the Opéra Citoyen initiative since 2022, focusing on making cultural heritage accessible to all audiences. To mark this shift, the institution recently adopted a new visual identity in line with this vision. In this context, they asked us to redesign their Drupal website to provide a better user experience and an interface aligned with their new graphic standards.
Our missions
- Functional and technical specifications
- UX and UI design
- Drupal Development
- Resumption of content
- Drupal Maintenance
- Accommodation
Context
The Opéra National de Bordeaux offers the public numerous productions each season, both lyric and choreographic, as well as many concerts at the Grand-Théâtre and the Auditorium of Bordeaux. Accessibility, dialogue, encounter, and sharing are at the heart of the institution’s cultural and social commitment.
We have been responsible for the hosting, preventive, corrective, and ongoing maintenance of the Opéra de Bordeaux since 2018. We have already carried out major upgrades from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9, and then to Drupal 10.
In 2022, the Opera undertook a major overhaul of its positioning and image. It entrusted us with its new brand environment to deploy online. As a result, we worked on delivering a true design system, which we implemented on the new site, launched in September 2023.
Scope of our interventions
We offer comprehensive support to the Opéra de Bordeaux teams, from design through to operation and maintenance of their Drupal site.
We handled the drafting of the specifications document and the requirements brief, in collaboration with the Opera’s project team during specification workshops.
The UX process involved organizing numerous workshops such as several UX benchmarks, an audit of the previous site, the creation of a new site map, defining user journeys, producing wireframes, and developing a guide to best practices for accessibility and eco-design.
We rolled out the Opera’s new identity by exploring several graphic concepts/intentions and developing both desktop and mobile mockups. Finally, we produced the Opera’s design system, which enabled us to deploy all the components that make up the website.
We relied on the Drupal 9 instance, which we upgraded to Drupal 10, with the goal of securing content migration and enabling the contribution teams to get up to speed (within a very tight timeframe). We then enhanced the features, integrated a new theme (atomically with Storybook), and carried out the necessary testing and quality control for the site’s launch.
The key point: the schedule
A strategic feature of the site, the events calendar was a major focus of our efforts. Connected to the Open Agenda platform’s API, it needed to provide a simple and effective experience, especially on mobile devices.
While the standard experience continues to be enhanced, the mobile experience has been pared down to the essentials, to make the user journey smoother and simpler.
Curtain raiser
Specifically, we have tried to add value at every level.
A grand exit
A big thank you to the team at the Bordeaux National Opera for their availability, their feedback, their energy, and their trust.
As a bonus, our client expressed their satisfaction with a lovely testimonial, which delights us and gives us a grand exit!
Revisiting the user experience of the Bordeaux National Opera with Drupal
The opinion of the Bordeaux National Opera on our collaboration
“Very early this morning, let’s say that some elves and (digital) fairies 🧚♀️ left a new experience for you to enjoy with the Opéra National de Bordeaux at the foot of your screen. Visit opera-bordeaux.com ✨Feel free to share your thoughts!Thank you to bluedrop 🧞 for the result and also for the human adventure that this behind-the-scenes development has been. Congratulations again to all of you. ”
