We treated the 2026 relaunch as a 360-degree engagement rather than a UX-only project, because the site couldn’t be solved in isolation from the brand. Brand strategy and UX strategy ran in parallel and fed each other throughout discovery.
Discovery was deep. We led visioning workshops with BalletX’s leadership and conducted stakeholder interviews across the organization — Marketing, Development, Operations, and the Chief Advancement Officer’s team — to understand how the company actually worked and where the website was getting in the way.
On the brand side, we proposed a refreshed mission centered on connection and the power of dance to move people both on and off the stage; an aspirational vision that articulated BalletX’s full ecosystem (free pop-up performances, Festival at The Mann, education programs, intensives, fellowships); and three sharp values — Innovation & Creation, Ballet Forward, Inspired Communities — that map directly to what the company actually does.
On the UX side, we refined BalletX’s audiences into five distinct segments: Cultural Consumers (ticket buyers and performance-goers), Aspiring Dancers & Choreographers (auditions, fellowships, collaborations), Donors (across individual giving, sponsorship, legacy, and Young Xers), Artistic Network & Partners (production creatives, tour bookers), and Community & Education (students of all levels). For each, we mapped distinct journeys from both the homepage and from email — recognizing email marketing as one of BalletX’s most important channels — and made specific recommendations for list segmentation that would feed the user flows.
The structural insight that defined the rebuild: reorganize the top-level navigation around what people are trying to do — Attend, Support, For Artists, Education, Blog, About Us — rather than around BalletX’s internal program names. A cultural consumer doesn’t need to know what “Dance eXchange” is to find a class; they need a tab called “Educate.” We renamed BalletX Beyond to Virtual Ballets, consolidated four support pages into a cleaner giving hierarchy, brought the blog (formerly X-Process, with Press & Reviews folded in) up to top-level navigation, and took NYC Ballet’s lead on individual blog posts — stacked, scrollable, narrative-driven storytelling instead of column layouts.
Competitive analysis sharpened the visual direction: NYC Ballet for editorial blog and homepage hierarchy, San Francisco Ballet and Scottish Ballet for how mature contemporary ballet companies present themselves online. Calmer color palettes to let performance photography breathe. More video. Clearer CTAs. A homepage that guides rather than overwhelms.
What We Built
Three Sites Across a Decade. A long-running partnership that started with the original 2016 BalletX.org build alongside Modern Good, continued through the 2021 pandemic-era refresh that introduced BalletX Beyond, and culminated in the 2026 anniversary relaunch — each version reflecting where the company was at the time, with ongoing maintenance and support keeping the site healthy in between.
BalletX Beyond (2021). Launched during the pandemic as a membership platform to bring contemporary ballet to fans who couldn’t be in a theater — keeping BalletX’s audience connected to the work when live performance wasn’t an option. Now repositioned as Virtual Ballets, with the digital library restructured around rentals via PatronManager and teaser content auto-playing on individual ballet pages.
A Refreshed Brand Platform (2026). New mission, vision, and three values — Innovation & Creation, Ballet Forward, Inspired Communities — built to carry BalletX into its third decade and provide a foundation for capital campaigns, donor communications, and program storytelling beyond the website itself.
An Action-Based Information Architecture (2026). A reimagined sitemap organized around Attend, Support, Work, Educate, About, and Blog. Five audiences find clear paths from the homepage; nobody has to learn BalletX’s internal vocabulary to use the site.
Consolidated Giving (2026). Four separate support pages — Ways to Support, Be a Sponsor, Legacy Giving, Young Xers — restructured into a clearer landing-page-first hierarchy with specific contacts replacing generic forms. The Legacy Giving page now leads with a “talk to someone” CTA rather than asking donors to navigate estate planning alone.
