The Crow Museum
Goal: Make it easier for potential museum visitors to understand available exhibits, plan a visit, and get involved
Role: Product Design Lead and Product Research
Collaborators: Emily M and Madalyn L (Product Research)
Timeline: 6 weeks
User Understanding | Design Strategy | UX Design | Visual Design
Overview
The Crow Museum offers visitors the unique opportunity to see a diverse range of Asian art at no cost. However, the museum’s existing website does not make it easy for people to easily identify current exhibits and plan a visit, and no mention is made of free entry on the home page. In addition, the website is not optimized for mobile, creating more barriers for users who are exploring with their phones. We aimed to address these problems in this redesign project.
Research & Ideation
We created user personas and associated empathy maps to represent and detail typical Crow Museum visitors. In an ideal world, we would have conducted interviews and observations, but for the scope of the project, we leveraged our own knowledge and experiences as museum visitors. This information, along with our website audit and competitive research of other museum websites informed the sketching and ideation process.
Redesign
The redesign makes it easy for people to quickly identify current exhibits and plan a visit. Free admission is clearly communicated on the home page. Finally, the redesign gracefully accommodates different screen sizes, making it easy for people to use with any device.
Conclusion & Personal Takeaways
Our project ended here, but in an ideal world, we would measure the impact of the redesign in terms of changes in website traffic patterns and engagement relative to the existing website, and ultimately in changes to the number of museum visitors before and after the redesign.
Overall, I enjoyed working on this project. It encouraged me to think and design with a focus on users and their goals. I particularly liked collaborating with my teammates. We brought different perspectives and ideas to the table, and our combined thinking was stronger for it.