The Wing Luke Museum

Aiding in navigation and content discovery for the Asian-Pacific American Experience.

Overview

The Wing Luke Museum (WLM) of the Asian Pacific American Experience is a small non-profit history museum local to Seattle, WA, with a commitment to celebrating and educating others about the culture, art, and history of Asian Pacific Americans.

Client

Max Chan (Head of Marketing)

Cookie Trout (Marketing Associate)

Team

Francez Urmatan (UX Designer)

Aaron Yeung (UX Designer)

Role

UX Designer | UX Researcher

Duration

Aug 2022 - Nov 2022

The Challenge

My team and I first approached the WLM with a desire to work with a culturally relatable non-profit organization to give back to our local AAPI community.

The Wing Luke team informed us that they had been experiencing high drop-off rates and struggling with user retention on their website, making it difficult to meet their business goals.

The Solution: Restructuring the Information Architecture

We opted to focus on restructuring the website's head navigation and footer to make points of interest more accessible to users in order to improve drop-off rates.

(Take a quick look ↓...)

Head Navigation

Page Body

Footer

Current State

The Redesign

Updated

Drop-Down Navigation

Updated Page Body & Content

Updated Footer

Sure, life gives lemons (but there’s always a reason): Taking a look at Analytics

We started off our research by taking a look at Google Analytics from Spring to Winter 2022 to gain some insight into user trends and concluded that:

1. We ought to prioritize the new user’s experience to encourage their return

87% of our visitors are new users, but the returning 13% spend a full minute more on the site and their eCommerce conversion rate is nearly double that of new users

2. In order to maintain our visitors and bring them back a second time, the landing page and site navigation need some work.

The landing page and “The Museum” (the current state’s navigational) page are in the top 3 visited pages on the site
However, the “The Museum” and “Join & Give” pages are navigational pages with no further content aside from links to other parts of the site with high exit rates of 10%.

(Not to get too technical, but with a 1% conversion rate for ticket sales, an annual opportunity cost of approximately $1000-2000 is lost. Yeah..not the best.)

Who are our users and what do they need?: Survey & Interview Insights

Having grasped some of the analytic trends, we turned to the actual users by surveying and interviewing visitors from the website as well as some from the museum’s mailing list.

With over survey 35 responses, we discovered that the majority of users are Seattle locals that discovered the WLM via word-of-mouth and media.

At this point, you’re still wondering: what would get these locals to stay? What could we change about the website to encourage them to return? Here's what some visitors had to say in an interview:

And in a nutshell:

The extremely minimalistic navigation caused more confusion and effort than users were willing to expend

Our visitors disliked having to work for their information and often quit their search. They were not willing to click through various pages on a navigation that was too simple and did not give enough context to the site's content.

Most visitations don’t go beyond the bare necessities despite museum attractions being the topic of most interest

Although the information on WLM’s events and exhibits is what visitors find most exciting, they struggled to locate the promotional information on the site and left the site after finding basic museum information (hours, location, etc.).

I observed a need for a more expansive yet convenient navigation and an opportunity to optimize the landing page to display the content that our visitors were wanting. But what exactly does that look like in the education industry?

Getting to know the industry: Competitors & Comparators

To answer my own question, we pulled information from the websites of other museums that our visitors were browsing most frequently (based on WLM’s Facebook Analytics), and the websites of three nonprofits organizations that weren’t museums and found:

All competitors featured a drop-down navigation menu with 6+ categories

Substantial promotional information of featured exhibitions, events, and programs on the homepage body

Organized footers with condensed information (spanning no more than half the screen), catering to niche interests

This information gave us an idea of the tabs we ought to put on the main navigation along with the content density of the page body and footer to streamline the information architecture in a way that makes navigation and content exploration more seamless.

Meet the users: Our Personas

The Average Seattle Local

The Museum Professional (secondary persona)

Persona 2 Janice - Museum Professional.png

The Core Problem

Our visitors need a way to view information about the WLM’s current offerings more efficiently because they want to be updated on exhibits/events but find that the current website is difficult to navigate around.

The head navigation is too minimal while the footer is too large and overwhelming, and both Amy and Janice want to spare no time in finding the information they find to be most interesting.

With a clearer understanding of the user’s needs, we moved on to ask the real questions:

How might we...

Reduce the user’s exhaustion during the searching process?

Cater to different audiences that the WLM attracts on a daily bases?

Make the website more inviting to make the users feel better valued?

The Groundwork: Site Mapping

Before getting into the nitty-gritty of ideating and designing, we started off by creating a map of how the WLM's website was going to be restructured. Take a look at the comparison between the current state vs. our proposed sitemap:

Head Navigation

Current State (Trust me, it really is that complicated.)

Proposed Navigation

Footer

Current State (large and in charge.)

Proposed Footer

Ideating the Solution

To start the design process, we started off with some rough UI sketches and low-fidelity wireframes on Figma to establish the foundations before arriving at our final design. Here's a couple of examples:

Landing Page

Sketch

Lofi

Hifi

Exhibits Page

Prototyping and Validation

After 3 iterations with 2 rounds of testing, we arrived at our final, clickable prototype, and below are the mockups of the final product.

How might we reduce the user’s exhaustion during the search process?

Design Solution: A comprehensive drop-down navigation making content across the website accessible and discoverable

Whoops, a boo-boo...

While building the head navigation, I envisioned a smooth, hover, drop-down menu that wouldn’t require the user to click the tabs or outside the dropdowns to make it disappear, and the users commented on this during testing as well.

Although I could not achieve my ideal vision in the prototype due to Figma constraints, both the users and stakeholders were pleased with the design and functionality.

How might we cater to different audiences that the WLM attracts on a daily bases?

Design Solution:

Prioritizing the user's wants by placing emphasis on WLM’s offerings over tickets and donations
Organizing navigation and page content in a way that makes information discoverable regardless of visitor type

Ticket purchase & donation options are made immediately available for returning users that already know that they want

Focus of homepage content is what visitors reported finding the most interesting during interviews (WLM's current exhibits, tours, and events)
Guide to planning a visit is made the center of attention upon landing as an easy starting point for new visitors

How might we make the website more inviting to make the users feel better valued?

Design Solution: Balance of imagery and text and added visual interest (navigation patterning, pops of color, icon usage)

Condensed Style Guide

Some visitors mentioned during interviews that the lack of interest in the landing page and the emphasis on tickets and donations were offputting, and made them feel like their interests were not valued by the WLM. In response, we opted to cater to the visitors' visual interest and make information more easily digestible via iconography and imagery to break up the text.

(Still curious? Check out all of our pages in the full prototype!)

View Full Prototype

So..did they like it?: Usability Testing & Success Metrics

So I talked a bit about our solution and the overall satisfactory end product. That's all fine and dandy, but there were some mistakes made along the way of testing.

Through both rounds of usability testing, we had the users complete the following tasks:

Find visitation information & ticket pricing
Find the exhibits page and food tours page
Find the museum’s directory

As you can see from the results, we were able to see some significant improvements in task completion and user satisfaction. But with running thin with time towards the end of the project, testing wasn't ideal, and here are a couple of things I would do differently:

1. One task per question

Multiple users in both rounds of testing expressed confusion with the second task (bolded above) because I had mashed two tasks into one question in hopes of shortening the testing process.

2. Strive for a more diverse range of users for each round of testing

Our first round of testing consisted of much older individuals that we were able to reach out to from the WLM's visitor base. However, we, unfortunately, had to rely on people from our personal networks for the second round due to time constraints at the end and had a much younger pool of people that are much more adept with technology which may be skewing the metrics of improvement).

Now what?: Next steps

At a journey’s end, I’d say it’s all looking much better fleshed out. However, nothing is ever perfect and the following are some steps I would like to take to enhance the visitor’s experience:

1. Redesigning the donation, ticketing, and online storefront and streamlining it all into one checkout flow

In its current state, the WLM features 3 separate checkouts for donations, tickets, and their online store
Donations, tickets, and the online store are key sources of revenue and now that we’ve captured the visitors’ interest, it is important that we make that final step as pleasantly hassle-free as possible

2. Optimize the site for mobile

Throwing it back to the personas, our visitors spend the most time browsing on their phones and for both convenience and accessibility purposes, it is important that the WLM website is optimized for mobile view.

3. Monitor performance metrics post-implementation

The WLM team is currently in the process of implementing our proposed design changes I would like to observe the new exit rates, bounce rates, and conversion rates to make necessary changes.

Takeaways

This experience was a fulfilling passion project that was something special to me as an Asian American and Seattle Native. Through my work, I was able to pay homage to the rich history of my local Asian American community and was able to experience a personal touch to UX design that I hadn't experienced before. I've learned that the UX discipline goes beyond just business objectives and aesthetics and discovered the immense potential of UX design as a potent tool that can celebrate communities and extend an invitation to others through its inviting visual appeal and user-centered accessibility.

Thank you so much for reading, and thank you so much to the Wing Luke Team and my fellow UX Designers for making this all possible.

Other Works

Wanna see more? Explore my other case studies!