Seattle Art Museum
A place to learn about culture and art
My Roles: UI/UX Designer
Duration: September 2020 – November 2020
Tools Used: Figma
Disclaimer: This was my first ever UX project and I started to redesign the interface of the website.
What is SAM?
The Seattle Art Museum (SAM) has been the hub for world-class visual arts in the Pacific Northwest since 1933. The SAM’s galleries contain collections from their own archives, temporary installations, and special exhibitions from around the world. The museum’s collection includes modern and contemporary art from diverse cultures.
The Problem
SAM’s website is not optimized to properly meet the users’ needs and does not display the engaging content of its current exhibition.
Moodboard
The mood board was created by me with the goal of improving the strengths and weaknesses of the current site and came up with new design principles :
Simplicity
Seamless Feel
Intuitive
Competitor Analysis
To be more familiar with the museum’s website design and based on my heuristic evaluation, I compared the various museum’s websites. Most of them had similar design patterns:
Provide a ‘Buy Tickets’ button upfront, which encouraged more conversions from online visitors to physical museum visitors.
Use excellent typography and a simple navigation header.
Pain Points
In contrast, SAM lacks an eye-catching visual element, concise navigation header, and effective information about opening times.
Golas
The main goals of the visual design of SAM’s website are:
To engage more users, build transparent communication
Improvement of navigation and information to encourage people to come museum
Audience
The audience of SAM could be broken down into a few different segments according to the academic papers I sourced.
First-time visitors: Tourist, New local
Frequent visitors: Student, Experience seeker, Recharger, Specialist
Guardians: Parent/Child, Teacher/Student
Key Insights
Competitive analysis and customer research demonstrated that SAM’s website lacked a certain level of engagement, excitement, and visual design that is expected from this museum.
The website must provide information about museum hours, including dates and times of exhibitions and events.
User Journey Map
Visual System
Final Concept
