"The adventure is, you'll never know what you find."

As part of Milan Design Week, Fuori Salone is an event where designers from across the globe transform every nook and cranny of the city into a design exhibition, boasting over 900 exhibits across dozens of districts. To many, the charm of the event is that the sheer variety of exhibits means it is generally not expected that event-goers would be able to visit every single exhibit on display throughout the week.

My team and I's challenge was to create a microsite that would capture and communicate this essence of Fuori Salone to both new visitors and locals of Milan alike.

How might we represent an event with over 900 exhibits on a single website?

The issue with scalability

Using pre-existing websites and the current Fuori Salone website as reference, we initially had differing ideas on ways we would structure the site:

Proposed strategies

1. Feature the event by creating individual pages per exhibition.
2. Create a gallery-style site by sorting exhibits into categories (ie. sustainability, technology…).
3. Group exhibits per each district in Milan that is participating in Fuori Salone.

What we realized was that with over 900 known exhibits, there would be major scalability issues with attempting to display all of them on a singular website. On the other hand, we noticed that fuorisalone only typically features four to seven participating districts. This felt like a viable way to categorize our content, and thus was the solution we decided to explore.

Let's try grouping exhibits per district... ish

An attempt at a 'choose-your-own adventure' approach

Our initial approach with the districts-based approach was to attempt to create a travel itinerary for each area, and showcase not only fuorisalone-related information, but also showcase cultural highlights and various travel information, as a way to deepen potential visitors' understandings of the locations they might visit. We called this a 'choose-your-own adventure' approach.

Diagram of initial content flow.

Less 'choose', more 'adventure'

The problem with this approach was that it was too informative, and thus detracting from the sense of 'adventure'. While Fuori Salone's primary charm is its ability to create dialogue around design, we were too focused on the tourism aspects of Milan.

Driving navigation through each district's design themes

Instead, we had discovered that every year, every district participating in Fuorisalone provides an overarching theme that exhibiting designers are expected to follow. (For example, Isola was x, Brera was y) Much like how visitors say that everything is a surprise at Fuori Salone, these themes would allow for us to obscure the districts and dilute them into design philosophies, getting them to focus on dialogue around design rather than the physical experience of being in Milan.

Diagram of revised content flow.

From content strategy to interaction

ITERATION 1

Obscuring the districts

In translating these into an interaction approach, I wanted to continue the theme of “choose your own adventure”. This was done in a way where the themes were placed at the forefront of the navigation. Rather than exploring districts by geographical information or name, I wanted visitors to be unsure of what they were looking at, with only the themes of each district acting as the waypoint.

ITERATION 2

Introducing a quiz format

With an overwhelmingly text-heavy landing page, I was unsure whether or not a visitor would be able to quickly understand that they were to read and comprehend all the themes before proceeding. I modified the page a bit and added a CTA to serve as a prompt for interaction.

ITERATION 3

Fragmenting the quiz format

Iteration 2, visually, still felt overwhelming. To orient the visitor before they are asked to complete the quiz, a teammate added an intro screen, which would load into a screen I made that would only contain the above CTA and a button to begin the task whenever a visitor was ready. By incrementing the initial parts of the website this way, the hopes are to ease the visitor into the extensive task of completing a quiz.

It's your adventure

Following completion of the quiz, the navigational order of the site will change such that each district is presented in the order that the themes were clicked on, ensuring a personalized experience per visitor. This approach surfaces these themes and primes the audience for the event by having them resonate with the themes, rather than explicitly talking about the exhibits.

Fuorisalone Event Page

Alongside the user journey, the interactions of the Fuori Salone microsite roughly serve two purposes: Guiding onboarding, or guiding site exploration.

ONBOARDING

Preloader & Quiz

Upon entering the site, users are given a brief introduction to the site then prompted to complete a quiz.

The quiz connects each district to their respective themes, while personalizing the site experience to the audience. Results of the quiz inform the navigational order of the site.

EXPLORATION

a. Theme Introduction

Each page in the site is structured to show a summary of the theme, referenced from their respective press releases, as well as a list of exhibits, referenced from various sources, including fuorisalone.it. Followed by the statement is a brief description of the district and its relationship to design, meant to give the audience context before they visit the districts in-person.

b. Previews of Exhibits

If provided by districts in their PR packages, a highlighted selection of their exhibits will be included to view at the bottom of each page. Visitors may drag the gallery vertically or hover to view details of the selected exhibits.