National Trust Mobile App

Brief

Pitch for the redesign of the National Trust mobile app.

The aim was to increase engagement with the National Trust – particularly by encouraging people to visit their local sites multiple times.

Concept

To encourage engagement, the new app was designed around the concept of an ‘Inspiration Stream’. This takes the users location into account, along with the day of the week and the weather, presenting a list of places that they can visit today. However, sites are expressed in terms of experiences – for example, using event content – rather than just standard details. This allows the same locations to take appear fresh each time the user views them.

Activities

The app contains inspiration for activities that can be undertaken and encourages users to share their experiences, thus encouraging others to visit.

Location Awareness

Using GPS data from the device, the app can detect when the user is close to a National Trust place and offer useful visit-specific content to them, via push alerts.

Team App

Keeping content fresh and interesting is a challenge. Alongside the integration of social-media content generated by visitors (e.g. tagged Instagram images), the idea of National Trust employees and volunteers creating content was explored. The concept was to provide them with a very simple dedicated app to create text, image, video and audio content which could then appear alongside the standard content for each place.