UX CASE STUDY

New-York Historical Society

Summary

Challenge: New-York Historical Society came to us to help them envision the possibilities of their digital presence. What made this project particularly challenging was that the Information Architecture possessed a high degree of complexity, which resulted in significant usability issues.

Solution: We streamlined the overall architecture of the website, which simplified user flows. By aligning the menu options with user group types, the primary nav bar went from 23 to 7 choices.

Impact: As a direct result of the redesign, the rate of successfully completing tasks went from 55% to 100% -- and the average time to complete the tasks improved by 40%.

Process

01 Discovery

02 Research

03 Research Analysis

04 Prototyping & Testing

01 Discovery

Methodology

Competitive Analysis

Competitive Matrix

Competitive Feature Analysis

Comparative Feature Analysis

Insights & Artifacts

We discovered three target user groups:

Researchers & Educators
Museum-Goers
Community Members

Initial Hypothesis: Each user group would have distinct goals, thus navigation (user flow) needs.

Potential Gap: There are 3 target user groups, but the homepage has 23 menu options and 63 more in the dropdowns. When we consider an individual user group, the vast majority of the 86 (total) menu options seem impertinent.

02 Research

Methodology

Usability Testing

Heuristics Evaluation

Card Sorting

Insights & Artifacts

We found three distinct patterns in how users perceived their experience with the website.

Research-specific issues
Uncertainty around language
Layout-driven confusion

Users could not move through the existing website with ease, specifically with features related to the library. The presentation of 86 menu options and text-heavy pages caused users to either fail tests outright or complete them via an indirect path with much frustration and an inability to repeat the task.

03 Analysis

Methodology

User Journey

Persona

Information Architecture

Sitemaps

User Flows

Layouts

Accessibility (mobile)

Insights & Artifacts

There are instances where navigation labels have the same title and appear redundant. However, through site-mapping we discovered that the vast majority of those actually led to distinct pages.

We were able to dramatically simplify the sitemap as we moved from the existing website into redesign. The sitemap here is emblematic of the proposed redesign, but inexact. If the client decides to move forward, a thorough content audit would be required in order to accurately represent the new sitemap.

In terms of user flows, the path to register for the library is only 5 clicks. However, testing revealed that 0% of users found the direct path. For this reason, we included a User Journey to represent the sentiment of the experience.