Brooklyn Museum
Overview
As a premier arts and cultural institution, Brooklyn Museum doesn’t live up to its reputation in their web experience. My team and I were tasked with analyzing the current information architecture of the Brooklyn Museum’s website and recommending a redesign that solves the needs of the organization as well as the visitors.
My Role: UX Researcher, UX Designer
Platform: Website
Year: Spring 2020
The Challenge
Museum websites are credible sources of information for their own collections and beyond but these resources are often buried under layers of categories with ambiguous names that require efforts of interpretation by the common audience.
How might we help art lovers discover new cultural and art related content through online resources prior to visiting a museum?
The Outcome
After conducting thorough evaluation and usability testing on the current information architecture of the site, we redesigned the taxonomy, organization, and hierarchy of the navigation to be more user-friendly.
UX Process
The ux process for this project was heavily focused on research and validation in order to ensure that the proposed redesign can improve user experience while keeping the design integrity of the current site.
Business Research
Through research and analysis we gathered insights on the Brooklyn museum:
It not only offers the visitors with art content and services but also takes the social responsibility of fostering community by connecting people through arts and cultures.
It’s a more general art museum that strives to be accessible and appeals to a relatively broad audience.
It has a great range of information, resources and engagement on its site.
Mission model canvas was used to gather the scope of influence and responsibility for the museum.
Competitive Matrix was used to understand the market position and competitive advantages
Feature Analysis shows a holistic view of what the competitors and comparators are doing well and not so well in relation to our subject site to drive our redesign.
Typical User
Florence is a representation of our user base and a reference point for us throughout the ux process. She is a busy student that loves going to museum exhibitions and galleries in NYC. She recently saw a poster on the subway for a current exhibition that piqued her interest and she’d like to find more information about it.
Usability Testing
In order to discover how easily users can find information, how they understand and categorize the current navigation labels, we performed usability testing with potential users of the site. The UX team also performed heuristic evaluation to assess where improvements could potentially be made.
Research Takeaways
Actionable Insights:
Users were overwhelmed by the amount of labels. Average 54% abandon rate on tree testing and card sorting.
Overall worst performing pages: On view, Calendar, Collection
Category names that have highest consensus in open card sorting: exhibitions (100%) and events (83%).
There were major frustrations around the wording of the labels.
Heuristic evaluation results recommend to focus on clarity and categorization of labels so that information is easier to locate.
To Keep:
Visual language/style
Current double bar navigation
Pages that performed well in testings
Introducing redesign
Current- “On View”
Main problems:
Ambiguous wording and use of uncommon words
Repetitive pages (“past” and “exhibitions archives”)
Proposed -“Exhibitions” (Changed from “On View”)
Current - “Collection”
Main problems:
An excessive amount of navigation pages
Inconsistent navigation structure was distracting
Proposed - “Collection”
Current - “Calendar”
Main problems:
Ambiguous wording and use of uncommon words
Inconsistent navigation structure was distracting
Proposed -”Events” (Change from “Calendar”)
Design Validation
Methodology
Tree Testing
Closed Card Sorting
Takeaways
Users showed a better understanding of the labels.
Overall improvement on usability testing results.
Sort in rate on Collection improved 73%. However, users who don’t visit museums regularly still struggles to distinguish it from “exhibition”.
The original three tier navigation might be distracting and therefore add blockage in performing tasks through the website.
“Events” had too many sub categories and was confusing for some users. (revised in the final prototype)
Next Steps
Based on feedback from usability testing, we made additional changes on the proposed navigation which were reflected on the High Fidelity prototype but would need more testings to validate the revisions. Looking ahead, we would like to
Potentially condense the site navigation even further
Conduct another round of usability testing on the revised redesign
Add a Brooklyn vibe and personality to the UX writing of the site
