Fresh From The Field — Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga website - By Tribal Aotearoa

Fresh From The Field — Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga website – By Tribal Aotearoa

Fresh from the Field is a weekly article series sharing the fresh and inspiring work of our Aotearoa Design Assembly community.

With intuitive storytelling and seamless user experience, Tribal Aotearoa walk us through their recent website design and build for Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Tanoga which works to inspire exploration across Aotearoa.

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The Brief

Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga are a crown entity charged with identifying, preserving and promoting Aotearoa’s unique heritage – they are a bicultural organisation committed to bringing Te Ao Māori values and Māori heritage to the forefront. While the organisation’s cultural strategy and behaviour had evolved, their website had not. The site was technically challenged, and had overly complex information architecture, limited search, text heavy pages and lack of any visual storytelling to establish a connection with the users – it simply didn’t reflect the organisation.

Tribal Aotearoa created an immersive experience for visitors seeking to engage with Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga’s people, resources and the places they represent.

The new website features a user-friendly design, allowing information to be accessed more easily – both functionally and lingually.

The Design Response

In the new website, Māori design is integrated throughout. The idea of Pou was central to our landing page design, Pouhere Taonga essentially means the post that binds the treasures. Treasures might be people, places, stories, cultural beliefs, traditions or things. The pou illustration inspires the feeling of whare and village. Elements that represent whakairo (carving) & Māori painting arts have been incorporated by artist and Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Kaihautū Dean Whiting who was instrumental in developing the aesthetic of the website.

Looking at our audience needs and organisation objectives we defined a new navigation that reduces clicks and exposes the site structure. From Inspiration to functional, our audiences are diverse and all equally important to the organisation, however all have different needs in relation to the website. We made Iwi and hapu feel immediately welcome by giving them a place central to the experience. The process has championed a sense of hapori (community) throughout and has especially elevated the use of te reo Māori.

Building out the design system we looked at new typography, and created a colour palette inspired by the natural colours used in traditional māori craft. With simplified navigation visitors can interact seamlessly with the website and its intuitive storytelling, which works to inspire exploration across Aotearoa. The refresh provides a much better experience of the New Zealand Heritage List/Rārangi Kōrero a list of the 6000 listed Heritage sites. Simplifies all application processes for users and also includes a contextual FAQ component to reduce confusion and customer support.

visit www.heritage.org.nz