Gardner Museum Website Refresh

This website project helped the institution shift its focus from internal organizational structures to users and visitors. Our goal was to go from a dated site architected around an org chart to a new site that was visitor-centric.

Challenge

The biggest challenge for this project was the culture shift a user-focused website required. The Gardner’s staff was used to their website reflecting the museum’s internal structures. Each department had its own navigation item and controlled the content for that section of the website based on what staff felt was most important. While many department heads and other leaders in the museum agreed a visitor-centric website was important, giving up control of content was a challenge.

Process

To show how important it was to change the basic architecture of the website, we needed compelling data. We got this a few ways.

Low-tech on-site survey to determine what content in-person visitors were looking for.

Low-tech on-site survey to determine what content in-person visitors were looking for.

Surveys:

We already knew the staff complaints about our website, but since our goal was to have a visitor-centric site, we needed visitor feedback as well. We did this two ways:

• Online: Using a simple, one-question survey, we asked people why they were visiting the site.

• On-site: Using post-it notes on a large wall within the Museum, we asked people to tell us how they had used the website prior to an in-person visit.

The results revealed that the vast majority of our web visitors were coming to the site in order to plan an in-person visit (a smaller percentage were interested in exploring art images or learning about the museum and its founder). By pairing the online survey data with the on-site data, we could see what potential visitors were looking for on the website and plan to make that content easily available.

Results of a card-sort exercise done to confirm navigation terms and content architecture.

Results of a card-sort exercise done to confirm navigation terms and content architecture.

User Testing:

We tested both designs and terminology with our visitors to confirm that we were hitting our goals.

Result

The Gardner has a complex offer compared with many other museums. It has an art collection - of course - but also exhibitions, ticketed performances and lectures, gardens, a café, a gift shop, and much more (including the unique story of the museum’s founder). We tested our designs and navigation terminology at every step to ensure that what we were building would support our primary audience: visitors.

After the new website launched, we received remarkable feedback. Calls to the museum asking for basic information about hours, parking, and admissions costs dropped by 80%. Our bounce rate fell while the number of pages viewed per visit increased. Sales of tickets to performances and lectures, reservations at the café, and revenue for the shop all remained steady or increased. Overall the project was a big success.

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