Photo Gallery
Since the art museum is open to such a broad demographic, it was important for my team to focus on different personas (as seen above) and focus on specific areas that visitors may obtain useful.
For example, Sarah, the first persona, is a student who is likely visiting the website to learn more about current exhibitions and do a little research before visiting for a school project. She would als
Mike, a professor at UK, would likely be interested in a membership if he is invested in the arts and wants to donate his time and funds to the museum. He would certainly focus on the different levels of membership to see which one would benefit him the most. In addition, it would be extremely accessible to sign up for a membership directly on the website for feasibility as it would make the pro
Our last persona depicted a high school student named Jennie, who was interested in pursuing art as a major/career. Although it would definitely be beneficial for her to visit the art museum, my team also talked about the advantage of setting up an internship to learn more about behind-the-scenes work to learn more about the process and stories of the museum setup/appreciation. Hence, it would b
End Result
Since Sarah has likely never visited the art museum before, my group included a lot of beneficial information on the visit page including hours, admission/tickets, location/address, and a phone number in case she had any additional questions. We also broke down additional information that may be less relevant for other viewers such as parking, accessibility, museum gift shop, photography rules, etc. By breaking them into a bracket-type design, it makes the page feel less overwhelming and more spacious. Otherwise, this page would be extremely text-heavy and viewers might lose focus and have a hard time picking out a specific section that they needed to look at. My group also decided to include a few shortcut navigation buttons on the bottom of the page in case they wanted to quickly view another page after they finished reading the ‘visit’ page.
In Mike’s case, my group took a close look at the membership (Join and Support) page to ensure we displayed the different types or levels of memberships without making it confusing for viewers. In addition, as mentioned above, we include the sign-up form directly on the membership page to make the application process as easy as possible. All the person has to do is fill out the information and hit the submit button on the desktop page. For mobile, we chose to include a button that sends people to another page to fill out rather than encoding the form on the page as mobile screens are smaller and we didn’t want to cram a lot of information that could risk making it confusing.
In addition, my team chose to include a direct link at the bottom of the membership page to take viewers to the internship page. If some prospective members such as students are not ready to invest in a membership, they might be willing to apply for an internship instead like Jennie and support the art museum that way! From there, viewers can learn more about internship qualifications/expectations.
Since most, if not all personas, are likely to view the exhibitions page, we gave viewers two options to navigate to the pages: either using the header or visual displays on the home page. Each page is organized to feature a few displays that viewers can easily swipe or click through at a glance. If they would like to view a specific exhibition one a single page or read about an artwork more in depth, they are more than welcome to do so by clicking the ‘view all’ button on the right side of the page.
Conclusion
At the beginning, my team set a clear goal to create individual deadlines as each person has separate strengths. This allowed each member to have clear objectives on goals and expectations in order to avoid members working on the same thing twice.
While mainly contributing to the home page and visit page for the UK Art Museum website, my main objective was to design a clear layout for these pages that could serve as a basis for other pages while not having any wasted white space. In the original home page for the art museum website, the margins on the page constantly vary and have large, empty white spaces, which don’t look right. The news section towards the bottom of the home page appears in a scattered grid, which differs based on the size of the picture, sometimes causing even more empty white space. It’s also important to note that this section appears at the bottom of every page on the current website, so I chose to remove it, while adding a page specifically for news. In the redesign, I worked on creating a template that used effectively filled white space while keeping the margins consistent with only including necessary information.
View mobile prototype: