Esplanade
Singapore Singapore
Website Restructure & Redesign
Bringing a national arts centre's programme and editorial into one journey.
Esplanade – Theatres on the Bay is Singapore’s national performing arts centre. It presents a year-round programme across concert halls, theatres, studios and free public spaces, alongside education, outreach and venue hire, serving audiences, artists, schools and donors from a single site.
Client
The Esplanade Co Ltd
Role
Senior Experience Designer
Timeline
2025
URL
https://www.esplanade.com
My contribution
Audited the existing site and mapped where its journeys broke — overlapping pages, unintuitive grouping, inconsistent labelling, siloed tagging.
Synthesised nine stakeholder sessions across 14 teams into a proposed information architecture covering around 92 pages.
Wireframed batches of page templates plus global navigation and footer, at low fidelity, before any visual work.
Assisted with visual design of pages for high-fidelity mockups including maintenance and building of design libraries.
Constraints
The site runs on Sitecore Cloud, with ticketing on a separate platform and content authored by teams across programming, marketing, education and venue hire. Every stage — IA, wireframes, visual direction, page layouts — was formally approved before the next began.
After
Before
Project Objectives
Early Insights
We audited the current site end to end, benchmarked five arts venues on discovery and four non-arts sites on accessibility, ran nine stakeholder sessions across 14 teams, and built four personas with full journeys before proposing a structure.
Things we found through our discovery sessions
Pages that overlapped
"Know Before Your Show" and "General Advisory" covered the same ground; "Get Involved" and "Support the Arts" both held participation content. Same intent, four destinations.
Filed by department, not by interest
"Naming conventions are very functional — they don’t mean anything to people who don’t know what we do." Content sat under internal structures rather than what someone was looking for.
Tagging never left the CRM
Tags were applied differently across platforms and stayed siloed, so related content never surfaced while browsing.
Nothing answered "what’s on today"
Visitors could not see across shows, exhibitions and venues at a glance, which is the most common thing they arrive wanting.
Offstage lived apart
Editorial built real interest in artists and works but sat outside the event pages it could have been selling.
Access information had no shop window
It existed, but never appeared on event cards or detail pages — so it was invisible at the exact moment someone decides.
Solutions
Structure first, screens second. An information architecture argued against four named problems in the old one and approved before a single layout was drawn. Wireframes at low fidelity to test the structure. Three visual routes narrowed to two, then resolved into a palette and type system. Then the build itself, delivered in four batches, with every template mapped back to its components so it could be tested piece by piece rather than page by page.
Outcome
Challenges
Key Takeaways
Argue the structure, do not assert it
Naming specific problems in the old IA and answering each one is what got a 92-page restructure approved without re-litigating it six weeks later.
Layout is where fragmentation actually shows
Related content sitting in different places is an IA problem, but people only experience it as a page that does not have what they came for.
Accessibility belongs upstream
Running it as a parallel research track meant access cues landed in the card and detail layouts, and every candidate accent colour was contrast-tested before selection rather than after.
Awards
The restructure took SG Mark 2026 for Digital Design, one of six winners in the category.
Winner
SG Mark 2026 (Singapore Good Design), Digital Design — one of six winners in the category
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