Burke Museum

Redesigning a natural history museum's website experience
UX Design, Web Design

OVERVIEW

In September 2017, I joined the Burke Museum to help with their new website development process. In the span of 4 months, I created design proposals to various sections of the websites, and have successfully spread UX awareness and methods into the organization.

Outside of my design tasks, I created 2 Python programs that automate certain operational tasks, and significantly optimized the work efficiency of the Communications team.

ROLES/CONTRIBUTION

Web/UX Designer
Identified current website problems and proposed design changes; created wireframes, interaction flows, mockups, and design reports

Python Programmer
Created 2 Python programs that significantly optimize the team work efficiency

Project #1:
Transaction Page Design
Project #2:
Homepage Redesign
Project #3:
Python Programs

OBJECTIVE

How can we enhance the transaction experience on the Burke website?

OUTCOMES

Wireframes & Flow
(scroll below to view)
Design Report
(Click to view)

RESEARCH HIGHLIGHT

With a combination of Heuristic Evaluations and Competitive Analysis, I identified potential problems of the current website.

Heuristic Evaluations

Drawing from Burke's website goal and industry best practices, I constructed a set of heuristics and evaluated the effectiveness of current website's transaction pages. Problems of the pages were then emerged. View the design report to see how the heuristics were used!

Competitive Analysis

More than 30 competing websites were then analyzed to explore potential solutions from the identified problems. Takeaways were noted for each competing website.

DESIGN HIGHLIGHT

To allow stakeholders better understand the result of the analysis above, I communicated all my proposals via wireframes.

Sample Sketches

I integrated all the takeaways for each transaction page with the Burke website and sketched them out accordingly.

Wireframes & Interaction Flow

After sketches, I finalized the wireframes and interaction flow, and delivered them together with all findings in a design report.

OBJECTIVE

Redesign the homepage to make it clear that it is a museum website and explore a bolder brand direction

SAMPLE ITERATIONS

I used bold artifact images to give off the museum impression; I also experimented with different visual style, guided by the existing brand guideline.

Iteration 1

Iteration 2

After discussing with my manager, I revised the first iterations as followed:

OVERVIEW

Many operational tasks (e.g. downloading files from many pages at once) relies heavily on manual implementation of the staff; during my stay at the Burke, I used my free time to code up 2 python scripts automate and optimize some operational tasks of the team. This significantly enhance the team operational efficiency and was welcomed by everyone!

CHALLENGE

Problem

Solution

The team manager needed to download content from 20 webpages to a specifically-formatted Word document. This task was tedious and time-consuming if done by hand.

I created a Python script that will automatically pull all desired content from a target URL within seconds. This program can be reused in the future.

see code

One team member was struggling to locate a particular hyperlink among 250+ blog posts. This task was almost impossible to be done by hand.

I created a Python script that will scan all blog posts and look for the target hyperlink URL.

see code

Reflecting Forward

Business Constraints // Team Collaboration // Web Design

I learned a lot during my 4 months at the Burke Museum! The biggest thing I have learned was to tailor my design to the constraints set by the business (e.g. time frame, budget, etc.) and to work with my team to make sure I have met the constraints. I also really enjoyed helping my team to solve their operational problems, and had the chance to brush up my python skills!

Designed and Implemented by Jason Chen. All Rights Reserved. 2017
Email: scierc@uw.edu
Let's laugh. 24/7.