Textile Museum of
Canada
Information Architecture/Navigation Redesign
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Client: Caitlin (CEO) of Textile Museum of Canada
Project: Group project | Course INF2170
Location: Toronto
Date: Sept - Dec 2023
Tools: Miro, Figma, Optimal Sort, DynoMapper
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Collaborative Role:
Card sorting
Content Audit
IA Diagram
Prototyping
Overview
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The Textile Museum of Canada’s website is dedicated to sharing, educating, and housing Canada’s only dedicated collection of textiles. With a long history, the museum and in turn, the website have gone through many transformations and additions leaving the website in need of a consolidated revamp.
Let's dive into the recommendations on improvements to the overall information architecture and navigation design with a focus on future-proofing any further additions that may be made to the website.
Objectives
Our goal is to solve the problems that the Textile Museum of Canada’s website is facing, like low user engagement and mostly in-person ticket sales. We want to make the site’s architecture and navigation more user-friendly in order to accomplish this. Our objectives are to make it easier for customers to buy tickets online, entice them to return, and spend more time browsing the website. Increased average user time on the website and a rise in the sales of tickets for various visits, events, exhibitions, and programs will be used to gauge success. In addition, user reviews, questionnaires; interviews, and an overall rise in museum visits will be used to gauge our success.
Target Audience
Old/New Visitors
Community
Researchers
Donors
Volunteers
Content Audit
To begin the audit, we used Dynomapper to collect the content inventory of the website. Each page was then assessed and a qualitative audit was conducted of the content. We conducted the audit based on usability, findability, actionability, and accuracy and assigned a score of 1 - 5 (1 = poor, 5 = great) based on the current website. These evaluations and notes were used to inform our next steps and recommendations.
A look into the audit spreadsheet
Usability audit:
Removed Pages (outdated): Collections, Blogs, Supporters, Press Release, Collection Spotlight
Condensed: Annual Reports, Collection categories
Renamed: Give to Donate
Added: Ways to Donate, At the Museum, Workshops
Card Sort Analysis
Our team conducted 8 open card sorting sessions virtually through Zoom. We conducted our sorting sessions using the online workspace, Miro, in order to inform us of our proposal to update and renovate the IA and Navigation of the Textile Museum of Canada’s website. Our card sorters were presented with 50 cards chosen by our team to represent the current content list of the main site and the “collection” and “blog” sites as well. These sessions were performed in Miro with digital cards and our team facilitated and quietly observed the sessions while taking notes.
Card Sort Sessions
8
participants
50
content cards
30
minutes
After the sessions, we analyzed the data further with Optimal Sort and identified patterns and trends. These are our findings:
Most used label
Donate
Visit
About Us
Grouped most
About Us
Contact Us
About the Team
8.5 = Average number of
categories created
Pain points
Social Being
TXTilecity
Narrative Threads
Cloth & Clay
Gathering
Using a combination of Optimal Sort and our Miro board, we grouped pages based on the majority of participant results, as well as insights gained from our observational notes made during the card sort sessions. We then made changes which helped us refine our ideas for the IA flexibly, and begin building hierarchy into our clustered pages from this point.
Information Architecture
The next step of our process was to organize the primary navigation of the site. To do this, we utilized the patterns, categories, and pain points we identified from our card sorting analysis. Since there are a variety of intended users for this site, including donors, visitors, community members, researchers, and volunteers, our goal was to create categories that would prioritize the individual needs of those users.
Textile Museum of Canada Website Information Architecture
We created six main categories: Visit, Collections, Learn, Blog, Join and Support, and About Us. The resulting Information Architecture Diagram we created uses lines, colour, as well as indenting, to show hierarchy. On the bottom right of the diagram, you’ll notice a legend, showing specific shades of pink and their respective levels of hierarchy (the lighter the shade of pink, the lower down it is in the hierarchy) with some of the content represented by stacks.
Navigation Design
After organizing the website content and creating the information architecture, we began to design the websites navigation system with our goals and client needs in mind to creating an intuitive, user-friendly, navigation experience. We first identified the current websites issues.
Current Website Issues
Landing Page
The current website uses a hamburger pattern as a primary menu navigation display, which causes navigation visibility issues for users, while hiding important information.
Navigation menu
The current menu displays too many, vague labels and takes up the full page when open limiting view of the overall site.
Collections
The collections currently doesn't have filter option to browse the content. Users are displayed with loads of content and pages to search through. This can be overwhelming for users and can be difficult to reach desired content.
Proposed Solution
Reflection & Next Steps
Getting the opportunity to work with a real client was a valuable experience. As a team we managed to understand the objectives of the project, understand the goals and needs of the client and collaborate on ideating and creating an innovative and user-friendly approach to the website redesign. Our next steps would be to further develop the prototype by creating the Hi-fi prototype as well as work closer with the client team to create the site's content.