2022-2023 — Website Redesign
Toledo Museum of Art
Role: UX/UI Designer
Client: TMA, Gary Gonya
Have you been to Toledo? If so, I hope you went to the TMA — if not, you’re missing out! An art museum for all to enjoy, and admission has always been free. The museum houses world-renowned pieces and a beautiful glass gallery across the street. Offers affordable youth programming by day, and special events involving wine and art by night. It’s the arts and culture destination of the midwest worth changing your itinerary for — especially now with the introduction of a new visitor experience. And for locals, it’s the best spot to take stunning photos, bring kids to learn about expression, or to have a simply dreamy afternoon relaxing in the galleries.
Alongside the TMA rebrand, I led the design of toledomuseum.org — bringing the customer journey to digital standard coming from a 10+ year old website. I collaborated with key stakeholders to identify goals, mapped the content strategy, and iterated on a comprehensive system of wireframes to hand off to the visual design team.
In this case study you will see:
Site audit outcomes
Visitor types, experience themes, and user flows
Sitemap and content strategy
Wireframes
Site Audit - Pillars of TMA former site
TMA Site Audit
In most conversations, a starting point for the redesign became about the museum’s former website. It was apparent that performing a light site audit was an essential building off point for the UX process. I did this by outlining what content existed throughout the site, and took inventory of the site’s navigational structure through site maps and simple content diagrams like the one above.
With the many usability gripes put to the side, the website followed a pretty simple structure. It presented information that fell into four categories — by breaking the website down to utility, it helped stakeholders understand what’s important to keep about the former site moving forward.
Doing this 2-week exercise allowed me, as the lead on UX, to immerse myself in the world of TMA’s output. Performing the site audit occurred after multiple IRL visits to the museum. It felt I was getting the realness of what the museum offered it’s patrons, further presenting the golden nuggets to bring into vision for the redesign.
Behavior flows show that majority users land on the homepage, go straight to pages pertaining to ‘Visit’ or ‘Events’. Furthered our assumption that most are going to toledomuseum.org for logistical information about their visit OR look to see what is coming up at the museum, events.
Stakeholder Interviews
Why are audiences coming to the TMA website?
Most to least frequently, audiences come to the site to:
Check logistical information (hours, admission, parking)
Learn about upcoming events / exhibitions
Register/ learn about classes and workshops
View donor and member information
View the collection of art
TMA Former Website - Dated back to ~2010 as the last website update prior to this project.
Former Site Feedback
Across the board, we heard that navigation (how it functions, how it’s structured/organized) is the number one pain point of using the current site.
Second to navigation, the events calendar. The way the calendar presents reoccurring events over upcoming / special events detracts from the range of what a visitor can do at TMA.
We’ll know the newly designed website is a success if...
⭐ INCREASES CONVERSIONS
“—more people signing up for classes, for events registration, more membership signups, increased number of visits, event attendance, where we’re just getting more people to do that.”
⭐ MORE COMPLEX BEHAVIORAL FLOWS
“I would really like to see a more interesting behavioral flow that takes somebody from the homepage to an exhibition to a program related to the exhibition to the plan your visit page, to membership, or so you know, I'd like to see a more more complex and thoughtful behavioral pattern, one in which we can get a better understanding of, of the type of engagement that the website can facilitate.”
⭐ LESS QUESTIONS for VISITOR EXPERIENCE TEAM
“Visitor experience team has less bullsh** to deal with”
⭐ UPDATING/MAINTAINING WITH EASE and EFFICIENCY
“I'd say that measure of success also is how user friendly it is on our end.”
TMA UX Research Included:
Site audit
Stakeholder interviews
Museum survey
Analytics report
Analogous research (other museum sites)
Collaboration with TMA Director of Brand Strategy
UX Research Concluded
Much of what I learned while conducting rounds of research had to do with the existing TMA website. It became the vessel to discuss where we were going with the redesign. It was clearly stated throughout the process that we were primarily focused on visitor experience. The existing site did a good job at housing all the content corresponding to the visitor experience, but it was the outdated design, confusing navigation, and disorganization of content that was the number one pain point. After a few weeks of research and immersion, I eagerly led the team into ‘Defining, Mapping, and Strategy’. I desired to get to deeper level questions like:
Visitor experience, who is the visitor? And what are the steps involved with experiencing TMA?
Restructure navigation, but with what purpose? What is priority? And what are the primary, and secondary focuses?
What are the core business goals behind the redesign? What transactions should the newly designed site be driving users towards?
I could have put the existing site through user testing or facilitated a workshop to learn more about goals, etc but I think it’s a designer’s job to look out for how long to keep a project in a research state. Through these research-oriented exercises — we’d built a nice foundation to start mapping from and forming a vision for the newly designed site.
User Types, Motivators, and Attributes
In order to transition from research to strategy, the project needed tactical definitions for different user types to consider for the next iteration of discussions. To begin, I oriented myself around the types of people you’d see visiting the museum. There’s people who are more active in their experience, and others who are more laid back. People who are more in the art-lovers category, or the parent looking to take their kids somewhere interesting. So, how does this all relate back to the website design?
The reasons people would be visiting the museum IRL could tell us a lot about the type of content they’d be looking for on the website, and if they’d be coming back to the website frequently or once in awhile. Balancing the super user and the first-time user translates to designing for the balance of utility and exploration. As much as the website needed to propel the art and museum offerings forward, it needed to be supported by a backbone of easy-to-find CTAs getting the more frequent user where they needed to be. See below how the Director of Brand Strategy, Gary, and I worked through this.
