Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
Discover the natural world
Project Type
Website Redesign
My Role
UX Support
Technology
Drupal
Tools
Figma, Sketch, InVision
Team Credits
User Experience: Courtney Clark, Maddie Purcell
Visual Design: Corey Jones, Joey Tackett, Shawn Banks
Tech Leads: Keenan Holloway, Chaz Chumley
Front-end Development: Russell Stoll
Back-end Development: Jon Lin
Quality Assurance: Casey Greene
Analytics: Adam LaCaria
Governance Strategy: Bridget Veerhoff
Project Management: Molly Mattessich
Account Management: Mike Shoag
Date launched: December 2018
The Client
The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is the nation’s natural history museum located in Washington, D.C. The museum is one of the most visited museums in the world, with millions of visitors coming through the doors every year. The museum is also home to over 147 million specimens and artifacts and has in-house researchers behind the scenes and around the globe.
Target Users
Peak Season Visitors (come during Cherry Blossom season, holidays, summer vacation, fall and spring breaks)
Group Visitors (school groups, guided tour groups, etc.)
Local Visitors from DC, Maryland, and Virginia
Educator Visitors (teachers and students of all ages)
Program & Professional Visitors (college students looking for research opportunities and resources)
Client’s Goals
The mission of NMNH is to promote understanding of the natural world and our place in it. The museum’s exhibits, research, collections, educational programs all aim to help people gain knowledge from our past and learn to become better stewards of our world today.
With the new site, the NMNH team wanted to:
Show audiences that the museum is a living place with incredible collections and experts.
Instill pride in audiences, as the museum is a publicly funded national resource.
Project Goals
Migrate priority content from the current site to a modern technical platform (Drupal) that integrates with systems in place at the Smithsonian Institution.
Create a responsive, accessible, maintainable, and audience-centered design with reusable components and styles for all future exhibits, programs, and science websites on one platform.
Serve audiences by helping them plan their visit to the museum and discover exhibits, events, educational programs, research, and collection items.
Support users in completing key tasks, such as donating, finding volunteer opportunities, or contacting a researcher.
Have a beautiful design worthy of NMNH’s stature as one of the world’s foremost natural history museums.
Challenges
Learning Forum One’s way of doing deliverables.
Designing a site that could eventually absorb over 200 microsites (many of them being research websites).
Key Takeaways
This was my first project at Forum One. I learned about the process of redesigning a website from discovery to launch, and I contributed to many of our deliverables.
The Process
Discover
Conducted workshops with the NMNH team. Interviewed key leadership team members. Experienced behind-the-scenes at the museum.
Design
Created a site map, content model, wireframes, and visual designs.
Deliver
Built a Drupal build that integrated with systems at the Smithsonian Institution.
Launch
Entered content, tested the site, and launched to the public.
Old Website
Stakeholder Workshops & Interviews
We held in-person workshops with 19 attendees from NMNH. During these workshops, we did a variety of activities to achieve alignment about the goals for the new website and an understanding of who we would be designing the website for. We helped participants better empathize with our audiences by exploring their characteristics and the jobs that people need to do. We also considered the messaging of the website with regard to branding and mapped audience journeys by identifying touch points of interaction with NMNH.
I supported my teammates during the workshops by helping with prep work, supporting participants during the sessions, taking notes, and taking photos. I also helped summarize our takeaways afterwards.
We also interviewed five key leadership stakeholders at NMNH who were unable to attend the workshops. I attended all of the interviews and helped with note taking.
Behind the Scenes Tour
To get a better sense of the breadth of Natural History, my team took a trip to the museum and got to experience the museum behind the scenes. Like some school groups, we were able to hold some of the museum’s asteroids and meteorites, as well as a piece of the moon and a piece of Mars. We also saw some of the museum’s precious gems and minerals, which were not on display for the general visitor.
Content Audits
To help the NMNH team identify which pages needed to be migrated to the new website, our analytics team created content audits of the old websites under the natural history domain. I helped organize these spreadsheets and guide the client through how to make decisions on which pages to keep and which pages to cut.
Site Map
I helped create a site map for the new website, organizing the pages in a straightforward way for our audiences.
Content Model
I learned about content models during this project, and helped identify which content types, fields, and taxonomies we would need to build in Drupal.
Sketching & Wireframes
Our team had many sketching sessions and wireframe brainstorming sessions. I contributed to these sessions and created many wireframes that were presented to the client.
Visual Design
Our visual designers on the project created the vision for this new website. I worked with them to ensure that functionality and content intent translated from wireframes to the visual designs. The designs were intended to convey the following brand words: Adventurous, Approachable, Curious, Emotional, Intuitive, and Trusted.
Development & Quality Assurance
During development, I was less involved, but I did join review meetings occasionally.
Content Loading & Testing
I was not involved in this phase of the project, but our site map, wireframes, and designs helped with content preparation.
Launch
The new website launched with great success. Months later, we did usability testing to see how users were navigating it. Ask me about that if you want to know more!