UX AND BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH

As part of an effort to modernize their website, I, along with a lead UX researcher, helped build enough research and evidence to provide the best suggestions improve the museum’s website. This involved a heuristic analysis of their current website, an in depth comparison to similar sites, and face to face conversations with museum visitors and staff.

Competitive + Heuristic Analysis

The first step we took in delivering a comprehensive analysis into improving the museum site’s user experience was analyzing the competition. We selected five different sites of museums similar in size, attendance, and art to that of the Palm Springs Art Museum. We also decided to focus on the four most visited pages by guests from what we gathered from our conversations with the museum staff, which were the landing/homepage, calendar, visiting info, and membership page. On each page, we annotated interesting features, commented on whether certain flows worked effectively, and were gathering ideas on what possibilities could be implemented in the PSAM site.

After this info was gathered, I applied a scoring system so to give context to the evaluation process and be able reference the different site’s features later on for the design process.

We also carried out a brief feature inventory for each of the competitor’s sites which served as another reference for when we would need to design wireframes for the PSAM site.

USER RESEARCH

A large chunk of our efforts were spent interacting face to face with actual museum visitors and Palm Springs locals. This included an in depth task analyses of the PSAM site and of the sites included in the competitive analysis, in which we gave users a list of tasks to carry out while we observed their behavior, kept track of number of clicks and time spent navigating pages, and finished up with a list of questions based off the decisions they made and attitudes towards each task.

We also conducted a card sort where we asked participants to arrange menu navigation options in the order in which they saw best fit. This would help us simplify the design process of the site’s main nav options down the line.

USER PERSONAS

The final deliverable was a set of user personas that were designed based on all of the the ethnographic information, research input, and user feedback that we discovered throughout the entire research process. These represent many of the average visitors and site users, including their habits, needs, frustrations, and desires.