Project Overview

Washington State historical society wanted to update their website to a modern look and feel, while also simplifying the complex navigation that existed. One of the focuses of this redesign was the Collection Search, an area of the site where users can search through WSHS’s massive collection of historical artifacts, as it was a heavily accessed part of the site and its complexity has caused issues with users in the past.

Team goal: To allow a variety of user types, from museum goers to researchers, find and curate historical resources for their needs.

Foundational Research

To capture the key issues with the website I worked closely with the UX researcher to uncover user needs. We conducted interviews, workshops, and went through Hotjar feedback polls to create user personas to be utilized throughout our process.

Methods

Information Architecture

Getting the right IA
A key client goal was ensuring that the information architecture would match the mental model of all audiences. To ensure this we performed iterative card sorting and tree testing with both groups to ensure they could find the information they were looking for after arriving on the Historical Society’s website.

Designing a Solution

Another focus of mine for this project was redesigning the user experience for a feature called Collection Search.

Collection Search is an enormous collection of artifacts, photographs, and archival material the WSHS has available, as well as a tool used to bookmark relevant resources to their research.

The problem
The collection search filters originally presented a vast amount of options, but many of those options were too specific to bring up relevant results, were confusingly worded, and/or had difficult to understand functionality. In addition the reductive nature of combining filters typically lead to dead ends.

• Too many options

• Way too detailed

• Lots of repeat or similar options

The solution   
After looking at survey results and site analytics, we found that a majority of the advanced search options were never utilized. In addition, through close collaboration with our development team, it was discovered that the search box feature could be enhanced to handle additional querying, thus allowing us to rely less on advanced filtering. 

• Used research to inform which filters were actually used.

• Stripped out any redundant or unnecessary filters

• Any filter option that lead to dead ends will be disabled

The problem
As users searched through the collection, they had the ability to save items to a collection list, however, the list feature of the old site was very limited. Also, as a text only truncated list in the left navigation, it is not only hard to consume, but very easy to miss.

• Very hard to digest

• Didn’t save from search to search

• Editing was difficult

• Only 1 export: print

The solution
We created an easy to find page that listed collections users had saved. We also implemented functionality for foraging through these bookmarked items.

• Easily toggle between search results and your list

• Can share, export to a CSV, or convert to a printable page

• Much easier to browse your list