PROJECT OVERVIEW

Founded in 1898, Monmouth County Historical Association, or MCHA, is a a multi-faceted non-profit organization that includes a main museum, five different historic house museums, and a research library that gives users access to historic archives. MCHA hired me to help the process of redesigning their site and reimagine their branding to increase ease of use for their primarily older target as well as to help attract a younger audience.

Our Goals

Our success ultimately depended on creating a more streamlined way to donate, purchase tickets, and access resources on MCHA's website.

Simplify complexity of flows for donating, purchasing tickets.

Implement Direct Pathways for essential tasks like finding the e-museum.

Highlight Hidden Resources that are currently hard to find but extremely valuable.

Attract Young Audience by rethinking brand identity.

My Role

Remote card sorting exercises
Interviews with 4 active users and 5 employees
Usability testing sessions and heuristics evaluation of current desktop/mobile experience
Responsive web design and prototype development

Strategy and Approach

Interviews – Spoke with stakeholders, Monmouth County residents, and general museum goers to identify core problem areas based on user feedback.
On-Site Observation – Visited the on-site museum to observe the different museums, the research & archive area, the current exhibitions to have a better understanding of MCHA’s identity, and spoke with real users that were visiting.
Synthesis – I led an affinity mapping exercise with our discovered insights and took the time to thoroughly assess & identify the core problem areas that we wanted to tackle.

Understanding The Audience

“I want to find things easily. I know what I’m looking for and
I don’t want to work too hard for it!”

Empower Users with Simplified Navigation and Intuitive Flows

Results from our closed card sorting exercise and usability tests show that MCHA’s navigation was highly unintuitive and category names weren’t reflective of how users thought of them.

Card Sorting Exercise Results60% of participants have categorized E-Museum as being closer to an exhibition as opposed to 'collection', which it’s currently categorized under.MCHA’s ‘Annual Garden Party’, a highly anticipated event in the community,… — **Card Sorting Exercise Results**
60% of participants have categorized E-Museum as being closer to an exhibition as opposed to 'collection', which it’s currently categorized under.
MCHA’s ‘Annual Garden Party’, a highly anticipated event in the community, is categorized under MCHA events rather than Annual Events.

2. Optimize Site Architecture By Optimizing Navigational Levels

Our redesign streamlines navigation by reducing the number of nav. levels and renaming misleading categories. By creating direct links to their valuable resources in areas of prime real estate, we created the flexibility that the original site lacked.

3. Highlight Key Resources Upfront

It’s not intuitive for users to find some of MCHA’s resources. Results from our usability testing show all users having a difficult time finding the e-Museum. We realized that key information was hidden in the navigation and hard to find, hurting their SEO for browsers.

For example, there is only one pathway to get to the e-Museum. There is only one direct link across the entire site and this link is placed all the way at the end of the page.

Museum website visitors know what they’re looking for. By creating direct links to MCHA’s valuable resources in areas of prime real estate–like the e-Museum–, visitors can find exactly what they are looking for with ease.

4. Improve User Flows & Manage I.A.

I wanted to make sure that text-heavy content was organized in a digestible way to make sure that users will no longer have a hard time looking for essential information. In addition to streamlining navigation, we also wanted to ensure that there was more than one way of getting to tasks, especially ones important to the brand–like purchasing event tickets.

Introducing An Optimized Experience

A Modern & Dynamic Feel

MCHA stakeholders wanted to move away from the site's static and dull look and vibe, so a new color palette for CTA buttons and headers was implemented with a sleeker header that calls out essential features prominently, and replaces the carousel with (3) adjacent clickable banners that highlights MCHA's key resources.

Stripped Down, Intuitive, and Responsive Nav

Reduced primary navigation elements to (5). Removed tertiary levels to allow for a more seamless experience and consistency throughout navigation. I designed a hamburger menu for mobile.

Stronger branded CTAs

As one of our main goals was to highlight revenue streams for MCHA, our redesign incorporates a color palette that grabs user's attentions for all buttons leading to a purchase, donation, or membership.

Redesigned Layout for Information & Content

Whether you're looking for details on an upcoming events or on one of their Museums, I have redesigned the way that information is visually provided in an accordian structure (expand/collapse) with all screens across MCHA visibly consistent.

MCHA