Walters Art Museum: Art Catalog Search Refinement
Information Architecture Design
2018-2019
[Info and visuals limited due to NDA]
Placing a business intelligence strategy at the heart of a non-profit research museum’s operations – and mindset.
Overview
Team
Elizabeth Jones
Greg Rosann
Dorothy Wallis
Theresa Sotto
Role
Information Architecture, UX Research
Framing the opportunity
Going into this project, I knew that data collection was never a weak point for the Walters: since 1853, the Walters collection of over 22,000 pieces has been painstakingly detailed in the collection of their research findings. What I didn’t know, however, was how to approach picking out an overarching narrative of the user journey from a widely varying collection of input spanning over one million points of data.
To address this, I split the flow of work into two phases. The first was an initial scoping phase consisting of 10 in-depth stakeholder interviews. This was to properly assess the opportunity and design the necessary program to create a long-term data strategy for the Walters.
“We have all of this data but because of our primary roles as conservationists, we aren’t as concerned with what happens after discovery.”
“It’s like a plate of spaghetti. You have to have real knowledge of the data we collect and how to connect all that and then you’ll still be scratching your head.”
“[Going through our catalog is] overwhelming and time-consuming, making it hard to find what we really need.”
It was no surprise to find that the Walters’ business intelligence capabilities lagged behind those of its peers and were far behind their most successful users. The primary goal of the project became to identify which pieces of data shaped the user's experience as they navigated our sprawling catalog.
Highlights
We came up with countless iterations, hoping to find one that would meet the needs of users and the expectations of our research and conservation teams. Defining the UX and content strategy was more challenging than designing the UI. Considering the wide variety of mediums the Walters deals with, manuscripts, painting, sculpture, even things like board games, would presenting all of these in a mix of artists’ names confuse and overwhelm users? Would we refer to them as writers, artists, or contributors when we use all three terms throughout the site?
There were many types of metadata to consider – piece titles, artists’ names, and geographies to name a few. We played around with tags and filters as a way to refine a search query. During user testing, we discovered that contextualizing pieces through what we call “category”, a predetermined set of filters based on a variety of tags and metadata, had the highest usage rate of our groupings. Making use of built-in filters, the “category” buckets remained the most used search with 84% of users sorting by “category” before searching specific keywords.
Given the breadth and history of the Walters’ catalog, data consistency had been a challenge for our organization. From an engineering perspective, the lack of uniform data in our collection was one of the greater obstacles in this project. For some pieces we had high-quality photos and full conservation notes; for others, only the title of a piece and an associated region. These inconsistencies made it difficult to land on a design that looked cohesive. To add more complexity, the design needed to be flexible enough to accommodate audio, video, photo, and other kinds of content we might want to add to the search experience down the road.
Outcome
One of the biggest outcomes from this strategy project – aside from the roadmap for execution itself – was helping stakeholders realize the shift in mindset required by the Walters for them to successfully realize any opportunity that involved data.
For too long, great data has been wasted within the Walters because of a lack of understanding, bad framing, or simply not having the tools required to engage with it. The knock-on effect of a strategy program like this, where stakeholders from across the business are engaged, is that it brings these conversations to light in the right way and gets people asking the right questions.
We delivered two roadmaps in this strategy. The first, an ambitious approach to transforming their businesses and quickly exploiting the opportunity they have in the market. The second, a somewhat more gentle approach to building the capabilities they require to transform over time. I believe I have left them with the tools to successfully execute it.