The Client
Professional Bull Riders Inc., or The PBR, brings the top 35 bull riders in the world together to compete week in and week out on the televised Built Ford Tough Series. The PBR is experiencing unprecedented growth. Today more than 600 bull riders from the United States, Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Mexico hold PBR memberships and compete in more than 300 bull riding events each year The success of the PBR has made it one of the most prolific sports on television. The elite Built Ford Tough Series is televised every week on CBS, CBS Sports Network and networks around the world. Annual attendance surpasses 3 million fans each season.
The Situation
In late 2017, Professional Bull Riders was looking to redesign its digital web experience. It sought to unify PBR.com, international sites for Brazil, Australia, Mexico and Canada, its RIDEPASS.com service, pbrfinalsweek.com, its rewards and ticket sites, its live mobile app. The various legacy systems powering these sites made offering a consistent experience challenging. In early 2018, PBR selected OMNIGON to overhaul its flagship digital experience, PBR.com, and create a hub for all other PBR digital assets.
The Challenges
OMNIGON’s team of designers and user experience specialists performed an extensive UX audit of the PBR.com and PBRfinalsweek.com websites in order to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. The audit revealed key barriers to capturing fan attention that the team aimed to improve within the redesign. OMNIGON identified the guiding principles that would inform every interaction and visual decision made during the design exploration process: performance, brand, culture, and intuitive. The features and design patterns of the PBR web experience were designed to meet the needs of both fans and the business.
The Solution
The Acquia Platform provides the PBR a feature-rich environment with a broad set of developer-friendly tools. It provided the OMNIGON team with a DevOps infrastructure out of the box and a simple means of managing and deploying code. Search integration has proven especially important, and the automatic Solr search integration within the Acquia Platform was a strong benefit during development.
The Results
PBR expects to launch its new responsive site in September 2018. The responsive website includes a homepage with three states for prior to, during and after live events, a photo and video hub, ticket center, results and statistics hub and a schedule page. The pages are clean, easy to navigate and features opportunities for fans to buy tickets to upcoming events or purchase a RIDEPASS trial. Additionally, purchasing tickets on pbr.com will be seamless as events can be sorted by date, premium experiences available or a specific PBR tour. Fans can also find all of their favorite PBR athletes’ statistics and rankings within the “athletes” hub.