Design Museum Foundation

Interviews with site administrators made it clear that they needed a way to quickly and easily post up-to-date content for concurrent exhibitions across multiple cities. Meanwhile museum attendees needed a way to discover, locate, and sign up for future exhibits.

During these interviews we also learned that the Museum captures a trove of assets (photos, videos, recordings) during each exhibit. We believed there was an opportunity to use that post-exhibit content in our design, and tested this idea during subsequent user research.

To recruit participants we attended several exhibitions and scheduled remote interviews to learn if and how they used the Museum website. Almost no one did. Nearly all visitors who weren’t brought by a friend learned about the exhibition from the Museum’s email campaigns because they believed the emails were up-to-date and the website wasn’t. Then every interviewee Google-mapped the exhibition location.

We also surveyed users about design sites they visit to better understand how they consume design-related content. We wanted to learn if users would consume Design Museum exhbition content after they had attended, or if they were unable to attend.

We created a landing page, provided attendees a unique URL, and compared the page traffic to tickets redeemed. To our surprise 57% of attendees visited the new page within 24 hours of the event ending.

Survery results revealed a preference for architecture-oriented sites that offered casual image browsing in curated categories. With our original hunch confirmed we began testing out a new gallery feature in our mid-fidelity wireframes.

It seemed natural to us to place the new galleries navigation item within Programs, however card sorting with 27 museum members taught us that users associated the galleries more with their sponsors than with the events. To create a value-add for museum members static galleries were made public, but content interactions (ie. viewing via lightbox or watching videos) required a museum member sign-in.

We sent site launch announcement emails with teasers for post-event content to a segmented email list of members and attendees. To make the post-exhibit gallery content financially viable, we proposed the Museum create added sponsorship levels for each gallery in the same way they do for underwritten events. This approach proved valuable to the Design Museum in conversation with potential underwriters, and became their way forward.