UX Case Study Unit 3 Brooklyn Museum Website Navigation Redesign

Overview

Our team set out to redesign the Information Architecture of The Brooklyn Museums Navigation Bar, evaluating the business needs of our client, as well as, improving the overall user experience and interaction. This research report showcased our findings, as we seek the primary target points to understand the reasons and justifications for our redesign. We explored insights from a business model canvas, competitive analysis, and heuristic evaluation, administering tests to participants to see what discoveries and necessary features we needed to change.

Responsibilities

As a team, my partners evaluated the Brooklyn Museum’s website and together we conducted our first round of evaluations and tests. Together, we figured out how users interact with the current navigation. From there, we broke off separately and created our own designs and solutions, conducting a second round of testing to determine how our designs performed.

Problem Space

We assumed users found it difficult to effectively source information they needed from the Brooklyn Museum website, due to unclear categorization and labeling of pages. If users can’t find relevant information they connect with, visitors can possibly deter, and not visit or support the museum. From here, we broadened our scope to generally brainstorm our initial problem statement, which was, How might we redesign the Brooklyn Museum’s website, so that guests can better discover specific information they need?

As we collected data from initial experiments, we focused our attention on our Persona, Florence, who we were ultimately designing for. We focused our problem statement further with her in mind, channeling her goals, needs, and pain points. We went back to our clients IA and after concluding our research study, we determined, How might we create a website that easily informs her of which exhibitions are upcoming and are currently being shown, as well as, offering her useful resources that include a variety of art and cultural programs. This way she can educate herself further while in school.

Scope and Constraints

Our research and design project spanned within the period of a week. While practicing self quarantine, due to the Corona Virus of 2020, we conducted our research and tests remotely, using optimalworkshop.com for virtual card and tree testing

Research Round 1 Current Website

We first started with building a Business Model Canvas to fully understand the scope of our client’s constraints. We had to figure out the type of business they were, their goals, and their values. Our team reviewed and analyzed the Brooklyn Museum’s website to learn more about their key attributes — how they raise money, their catered demographic, activities they promoted and offered to the community. What sets Brooklyn Museum apart is that it hosts events, classes, and festivals, gathering customers, ranging from all age groups — seniors/students/ teens/families/ and K-12.

We then created a Competitive Matrix to identify the trends and attributes other museums in the industry were practicing, analyzing our client’s strengths and weaknesses compared to their competitors. We used this matrix to research and map out core features and characteristics from the Brooklyn Museum website that aligned with our persona’s needs, goals, and pain points. Florence’s goals were, discovering new artists and culture, while managing her busy schedule. Her needs included, finding a better way to view which exhibitions and events were on display and accessing the hours and admissions information. Her pain points were that she wasn’t aware of the upcoming exhibitions or which artists were being represented. We used this information to label our matrix axes with 4 main features: “Multifunctional” vs. “Specialized” and “Exhibition Variety” vs. “Availability.” One example from the competitors was that The Whitney displayed twentieth-century contemporary American art, while the Brooklyn Museum explored a lot of multicultural exhibitions, ranging from different time eras. On top of the competitive matrix, we also did a competitive and comparative analysis, further documenting the differences of each museum based on our personas needs.

Continuing with our research, we wanted to test the current navigation and see what results came about, so we could determine what we needed to prioritize to solve for it’s counterintuitive layout. We began a tree jack study by giving participants 3 scenarios/tasks, which required them to interact with Brooklyn Museum’s current navigation.

Our tasks were:

Task 1:

Your father is in town and you would like to take him to the museum to explore a new culture. Please see if the museum will be open at 7pm on Thursday.

CORRECT PATH: Visit >> Hours & Admission

Task 2:

Your friend will be a featured artist at Brooklyn Museum. Find out when this exhibit will be shown.

CORRECT PATH: On View >> Upcoming

Task 3:

You’re in charge of organizing a school sponsored group tour with a few classmates to view Egyptian art. Locate more information on how to set this up.

CORRECT PATH: Education >> Adults and Academics

Overall, based on our three scenarios/tasks only 30% of our participants successfully completed the evaluation. From these results, we can confirm Brooklyn Museum’s current navigation wasn’t fully comprehensive or intuitive.

For Task #1, about 73% of participants had a direct success path, which required them to navigate to the Visit page to click on Hours & Admission.

Task #2 required participants to navigate to the On View page to discover the Upcoming Exhibits, however, only 18% had direct success while 82% had direct failure.

There were no participants who successfully completed Task #3. About 45% of participants did indeed navigate to the Education page, but failed to know that they needed to go to Adults & Academics to successfully complete the task.

Continuing to examine the current navigation, our team also did a round of open and closed card sorting. Participants would sort subjects associated with each category. Both primary and secondary navigations would be grouped together, as they desired. Percentages were shown who sorted each card into the corresponding category. From this data, we can now propose the most popular groups based on each individual card’s highest placement score.

• 60% of the participants sorted that Current, Touring, and Upcoming under On View
• The other 40% of participants who did not think any exhibits would be under “On View” felt that exhibits could be located on the “Visit” or “Collection” pages.

Using the “Abby Method” for heuristics, our team analyzed the information architecture of the current Brooklyn Museum’s website. For our redesign, we focused on Findable/ Clear/ Communicative/ and Delightful.

Recommendations

Some final redesign takeaways from our Heuristics Evaluation was

• Change “On View” to “On Exhibit”
• Add hours on every header for more immediate viewing.
• Remove “Visitors with Disabilities” from the “Education” tab and keep it in the “Visit”
• Change Education to Educational Programs and Adults and Academics to Students to indicate that they’re events and classes and opportunities for students like Florence

Research Round 2 Proposed Website

With our corrections in place, we ran additional rounds of tests. We mainly looked at our tree test results, to evaluate our improvements. We used the same scenarios and tasks and based on the results and overall our margins increased by 30%.

For Task #1, about 92% of participants correctly navigated through the task.

For Task #2 67% completed the correct path

And for Task #3 there was onto 25% of participants who indirectly completed the task.

Conclusions and Outcomes and Next Steps

For our Task #1 we improved this navigation by 10%

For our Task #2 we improved this navigation by 49%

For our Task #3 we improved the navigation by 25%

60% of our participants completed our navigation route, but for our next steps, since there was only a 25% indirect success rate, we would need to reevaluate and either improve the design and rewrite our scenario. As a design team that looks out to improve the business and users’ needs, we will continue to strive to make Educational Programs a more pleasing destination for users like Florence, so they can find more opportunities and utilize these assets to learn new things.