Textile Museum of Canada
Improve textile museum visitors' digital experience
Team: Danni Liu, Nancy Xiang, Samantha Ho, Zijie Wang
Responsibilities: Card Sorting, Content Audit, Information Architecture, Prototype
Timeline: Nov 2023 - Dec 2023
Tools: Figma, Miro, Excel, DynoMapper, Optimal Workshop
What is this project about?
The Textile Museum of Canada is the only museum in Canada focused on exhibitions and programs related to textile arts. The museum has partnered with our course to address the problem of users reporting difficulties in using and navigating the website.
So, how might we use our knowledge to redesign the information architecture and navigation of provide the museum's website, and provide online visitors with an intuitive and joyful navigation experience?
This is our design process:
User Assessment
To generate recommendations for how to redesign the information architecture structure, we first need to understand user needs. The Textile Museum of Canada held an information session, which my team and I attended and took notes. We discovered some valuable information:
What does our customer want?
Who are our intended users?
1. Emerging Textile Population: Young individuals aiming for a career in textiles and currently enrolled in relevant educational programs
2. Traditional Museum People: For people who enjoy museums and art exhibitions
3. Underrepresented Population: Indigenous communities, english as second-language users, and accessibility communities
Content Audit & Analysis
To rebuild the information architecture and navigation design, we needed to identify all the pages on the website. We used DynoMapper to crawl the website and obtained a list of all the pages. Next, we reviewed and refined the list to determine if any pages needed to be removed, adjusted, or added by the museum.
This is the criteria checklist for reviewing pages:
Snippet from the Content Inventory List to the Final Content List:
What did content auditing tell us?
Gap in Community Engagement
Insufficient content fostering community engagement, particularly with diverse audiences.
The 'Collection' category is underdeveloped and could be linked with 'What's On' for better integration.
The layout of this page does not seem to be very consistent with the museum’s branding style.
Our audit shows that most of the website pages match the museum's goals and strategies. However, we have a few suggestions for the content:
Remove the ‘Cloth and Clay’ Page
Integration of 'Collection' & 'What's On'
Card Sorting
Next, we conducted card sorting sessions on Optimal Workshop with 8 individuals to understand how users prefer to group and label items in a way that is easy and intuitive for them, which will inform our information architecture redesign.
Snippet from the card sorting results raw data:
What did we learn from card sorting?
Simplify Navigation Language
Use single verbs for navigation names and get rid of ambiguous terms (e.g., Collection, TXTilecity).
Overwhelming Content
Participants mentioned that a lot of cards were overwhelming, making it difficult to navigate and organize the content effectively.
Gaps in ESL Users' Understanding
ESL participants reported not understanding the term “textile,” highlighting a limitation in the Textile Museum’s target audience.
Rebuild IA Diagram
What are the IA recommendations from card sorting?
Our redesign IA diagram of the museum's website includes a few key components:
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Main Diagram: The level 0 category is Home, followed by Level 1 categories in dark pink, Level 2 categories in normal pink, Level 3 categories in baby pink, followed by the content stack pages in grey.
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Utility navigation (Top-Right): Provide users with quick access to essential functions on the website to improve overall efficiency, inlucding tickets, my account, and donate.
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Footer Navigation (Top-Right beside utility navigation): Provides a space for essential information that we want users to access easily, without needing to navigate menus or search for specific details.
How does our IA diagram process look like?
Overview of final IA diagram
Reduce the number of excessive categories.
Improve Categorization
Language Clarifications
Conveniently access details about the Textile Museum, including exhibit information, admissions, and directions.
Easy Information Access
Clarify the language used for both navigation labels and content.
Navigation Redesign
Next, we reviewed the current website’s navigation design to identify gaps for improvement and then created a mid-fidelity prototype for the redesigned navigation system.
We changed the hamburger menu into a global navigation drop-down menu
This will simplify the user journey by eliminating the extra step of clicking into the hamburger menu to access different tabs.
Desktop Key Transformation
We changed the location of the utility navigation
Moved the utility menu from its hidden position on the homepage to the global navigation with clear labels, making it more visible and allowing users to easily purchase tickets online.
Current Design
Redesign
Current Design
Redesign
Improved categorization and clear labels
We used card sorting insights to improve content categorization and rename labels for clarity. For example, we changed the label 'Social Being,' which was confusing to users, to 'Social Being Programs' under community engagement to better promote the museum’s programs and reduce confusion.
Current Design
Redesign
Mobile Key Transformation
Our redesign of mobile navigation primarily focused on reworking the workflow of the items inside the hamburger menu to align with the desktop version and avoid overwhelming users with too much information at once.
Revised Design
Original Design
