Overview
Building a Digital Platform for All Audiences
First impressions matter, especially for the Irish Film Institute (IFI). Its work stretches far beyond the cinema screen, spanning film exhibition, preservation, education and the promotion of Irish film at home and abroad. Instead of people heading straight to the ticket page like any cinema site, we wanted them to dwell on the full IFI offering.
While a movie is led by the writer and director, a website puts control in the hands of the audience. They click, navigate, search, read and go back, deciding at every moment what appears next on the small screen. If Scorsese were a UX designer, we like to think he’d have enjoyed this project.
View the site
ifi.ie
Backstage accessibility
Accessibility can sometimes be treated like post-production, considered once the main work is already complete. For IFI, as with all our projects, it was embedded from the start.
Accessibility was considered throughout UX, UI, development and QA. Keyboard navigation was tested at every stage, while semantic heading structures and clear content hierarchies helped make pages easier to understand and navigate with assistive technologies.
We also introduced a motion toggle, giving users the option to reduce the site’s dynamic background animations while preserving the movie magic for those who want the full experience.
The result was a website designed and tested against WCAG Level AA requirements, with accessibility treated as essential rather than an addition.
Creating a cinematic user experience
Cinema comes with an incredibly rich visual language, giving our designers and UI team plenty to work with. Rather than adding movement for movement’s sake, we looked for details that could recreate some of the anticipation, nostalgia and ritual of going to the cinema.
The booking CTA became an interactive ticket stub that appears to tear when selected, turning a familiar digital action into something more tactile. Film-reel treatments frame imagery from current releases, while projected menus and subtle motion borrow from the look of the cinema itself.
One of our favourite design choices was using a projector as a creative interpretation of a dropdown menu. Small crosshairs inspired by a film camera reinforce the cinematic feel, while even the way pages open and close takes cues from the movement and transitions of film.
The details continue as users move through the site. The IFI identity catches the light like a spotlight passing across a screen, adding moments of character without getting in the way of the task at hand. Together, these interactions create an experience that feels distinctly IFI.
Making discovery easier
With screenings, festivals, archive content, education, membership and much more competing for attention, the new website needed to make a large and varied offering simple to navigate. Crucially, IFI’s three core pillars of Exhibit, Preserve and Educate needed to feel equally represented, while still helping users quickly reach the films, events and information most relevant to them.
We worked in a way that made the sheer quantity of content and ever-changing listings considerably easier. Using a Single Source of Truth (SSoS), our teams could work in parallel rather than waiting for one stage to finish before another began. Backend development could progress while UI was being designed, creating a more efficient workflow while maintaining consistency across the final experience.
What we did
- UI / UX design and development
- Information architecture
- Content strategy and development
- CMS integration
- SEO analysis and implementation
A great ending
The new site gives the Irish Film Institute a clearer digital identity and makes its wider cultural and educational offering far easier to discover.
A complete rethink of the UX improved access across the site, helping audiences move beyond screenings and explore areas such as the Film Shop, café, restaurant, archive and education programmes. Just as importantly, the finished project brought together the things that mattered most to IFI, ticking all the boxes across look, feel, navigation and functionality.
When it came time for the rolling credits, both the IFI and Kooba teams had a site they were genuinely proud to put out into the world.
