The Merchant’s House Museum, located in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, is a small house museum housed in a building from 1832.
It has welcomed visitors to explore the home and garden since 1936.

Sources

The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on the MHM museum. Although MHM has seen an overall increase in visitors, reaching young adults (approximately 18 to 35 years old) remains a challenge
The administration aims to address this by giving attention to the museum's website and believe that by focusing on this crucial point, they can successfully engage this elusive demographic

Source(Page: Hours&Admission)

Source(Page: Events Calendar)

To understand what drives our target users: people age 18-35 to visit historical museum, we decided to uncover the thoughts, motivations, and behaviors through user interviews.
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We have done 8 user interviews with potential historical museum visitors
→ Click here to see our interview protocol

Then, we utilized Affinity Diagram to identify users' similar and different thoughts when it comes to historical museum related information‍

Here are some key findings✨

Major information they wish to get on websites of museum include: exhibition content, price, ticket reservation, museum type/general info and opening hours

Content is the decisive factor for visiting a museum. Other significant factors include: popularity, recommendations from others, location, venue size, and pricing

We created persona according to the previous user research's result, helping us better understand who we're redesigning the website for and what are the most important things to focus on‍

After gaining a better understanding of our target users, we selected 8 competitors, conducting competitive analysis to focus on exploring the preferred pattern/certain design standard for them
→ Click here to see our Rating Criteria & Results

Some of the takeaways highlight:

Use of empty space of UI is essential to not overwhelm the users

Almost every museum put info of “visit”, “explore(exhibition)”, “ticket” on the most noticeable positions, showing the priority of this information to website users

Consistent design system creates a cohesive website design and better user experiencce

How do we do it?
Card Sorting and Tree Testing!

They guide us to re-organize the current content and overall information architecture(IA) of the website, making sure our following design decision could reach an accessible and intuitive experience

— Card Sorting

We spent time viewing all content on MHM’s website, breaking down them into a list of content items on google doc

→Source

Then, we recruited 9 participants, using optimal workshop to understand users' preferred way to group content and analyzing data with Similarity matrix chart

Based on the sorting result, we re-group the content under these top 7 categories which is the new MHM website IA :

— Tree Testing

To evaluate if target users could navigate the website smoothly under the new IA we made, we asked 9 participants to join this tree testinge made 10 tasks and see if the participants could finish‍

Overall completion rate 69% is not bad, but it means there is still something need to be revised
For example, here is an interesting finding and what we changed:

7 out of 9 testers reach the wrong destination when looking for entrance fees under current IA. They went to the page "Event Ticket" instead of "Admission"
→ Rename page “Event Ticket” to “Ticket Admission”
→ Gather general admission, event ticket admission, and tour admission all under "Ticket Admission” page

Our final Information Architecture is finished✨

Our MVP version will focus on producing key pages/features that we learned based on the findings from previous user research, including key user flows/features:
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Get to know MHM —  
→ Learning what MHM is
→ What kind of events/exhibition are provided by MHM
Plan a visit to MHM —
→ General visiting information
→ Buy tickets

We started working on the low-fi wireframe together, visualizing how the website content and each component could be positioned on each desktop and mobile page:

Making a reusable component and design guideline to ensure the team is doing a higher-quality design and our users will have a consistent navigating experience!

We need to know how users would interact with the current design, so we collected 6 people to conduct usability tests

According to the feedback from the usability test, we revised some parts of our design, for example:

Plan Your Visit Page—

Feedback from usability testing for Before version:

“We did not notice the Shortcut Bar on the top” “The information is not that much to need a Shortcut Bar”

“Some information looks overlapped(Ex:location & travel direction／COVID-19 Protocol & Tour Policies)”

“Why the layout of “COVID-19 Protocol” section is different with others?”

After version:

Remove the Jump Button Bar on the top

Combine information seems overlapped or redundant together in one section and Re-arrange the layout of the page

Completing this design project with my team has been challenging but also an amazing journey. I learned so much details especially for conducting user research, and have chances to know I need to improve my analysis ability from convert the findings to insights. Lastly, it is always important to stick to your findings results when you are doing every step afterwards
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Overall I really appreciated the opportunity to complete this project with my team and obtain so much useful feedback and suggestion from our instructor, Julie!