UI/UX Case Study: The Louvre

I received this as a timed User Experience Challenge from IBM in late Oct, 2018. I worked on this for 5 hours as recommended.

Prompt:

Challenge Redesign parts of a website for the world’s largest museum: The Louvre. Your co-worker, a user researcher, has analytics that show many users are looking for information on prominent pieces of art, but are leaving before they find what they want. Propose changes to address this feedback.

Louvre Website: https://www.louvre.fr/en

Redesign Scene

Prompt Interpretation

Because of the time constraint, I wanted to narrow down the issues presented in the prompt, and decided to take some liberty the interpretation -- what is meant by “looking information of prominent art pieces”?   I assume there are two categories of visitors/users using the site.  Some may already know what they want to look for, while some may not know the exact art piece(s) they want to learn more about.  With this generalization, I later used them as guides to set up the tasks I would later give the users.

Setting Up User Experience Walk Through:

To actually help improve the experience of the users, I used convenience sampling.  After a quick look at the current website, I gathered two interviewees on the go, and had them walk me through their experiences navigating through the current louvre website. Each interviewee were given the premise that they should navigate the site as if they were to visit the Louvre the next day, and are on Desktop/Laptop.

Interviewee 1:  Drew (25, Male, Student)

Interviewee 2: Michael (22, Male, Recent graduate)

User Tasks:

1. Having in mind a famous piece of art you knew that is in the Louvre, try to navigate the website to find information about the art.

2. You do not exactly know what specifically you want to see, but you definitely want to see something famous.  Try to navigate the website to find what you might want to check out.

Evaluation on current website

User feedback

User 1:  Drew

At first Drew did not see the search icon (magnifying glass) on the right panel right away.

After typing in “mona lisa”,  instead of clicking “ok”, Drew clicked on the search icon, thus landing on another search page.

After entering the search term, Drew also thought the icon immediately to the right of the text box is a search button, but it is actually a help button.

User 2:  Michael

Michael wished to find works by Da Vinci.  His attention was first drawn to the top navigation.

Michael saw opened up the search bar, entered “da vinci”, but expressed frustration on the options under the search bar, as it was not very clear how those categories differentiate themselves from one another (both in the language and the icons used).  

After the search result came in, It was not clear which result was a strict match.  Michael was confused if all the results shown were indeed matched with Da Vinci as an author, only the first one was.

My perspective

I also noted that there were two buy ticket options on the pop up menu on the side,  while there also was a very conceptually similar shopping cart that meant shopping for souvenirs.  The search options under the search bar were intentionally ignored by both users (users did a double take but chose not to click) as the users thought the options were vague.

Ideation

I started thinking about who are the groups my design of the website should serve, thus arriving at the 2 following POVs: that of the visitors, and of the museum (admins).

First Iteration

I aimed to redesign mostly the homepage and the search result page with the time given.  I wanted to better aid user searching, reduce user slips and errors by use consistent, familiar designs.

• I opted for a less cluttered visual design, and cleared up the top navigation to accentuate each options more. One is with a search bar on top, and in the other variation the search bar pops up on click.

• I also added a blurred/suggestive search mechanism.

Final Design

• I added a blurred search mechanism upon query in case of typos or incomplete search words.

• I also added a filtering mechanism to give a more selective results for the user.

Discussion

Because this was a 5-hour challenge:

• The two users were found through convenience sampling.

• I could not further redesign nor conduct A/B testings.

• The current Louvre web design has not been optimized for mobile, nor did I had the time to redesign for it.

Acknowledgements

Thanks for the challenge IBM put out for this year and special thanks for my interviewer, whom gave me permission to make this a case study.  

Special appreciation goes to my design mentor from my previous startup position, Whenshuo Li, for giving me advice on how to approach redesigns for a timed challenge.