Process

Because the Burke Museum site lacked any metrics or specific evaluation of performance, I initiated a overall site review using Google Analytics and another log analyzer to assess the site based on various metrics specific to non-ecommerce sites (visitor loyalty, bounce rate, etc.) The metrics indicated a lack of user engagement in certain sections of the site that were expected to draw users deeper into the site.

Based on the web analytics results, I justified the need to rethink our design for collection landing pages as well as the overall taxonomy for the navigation. I then created wireframes for a redesign to feature new and important content and tested high fidelity prototypes to be implemented pending stakeholder approval.

Project: Mammals of Washington

• created XML structure for all content
• redesigned pages with multiple navigation options
• changed to match Burke style and created mock AJAX effects

Process

The Mammals of Washington subsite of the Burke Museum was originally about 146 HTML pages describing each species of mammal in Washington state. I decided that we could condense these pages by converting them into XML data displayed with PHP and JavaScript. I created an XML structure to include the basic species information and to accommodate images and links later.

When designing the display of the new Mammals of Washington, I thought that the user should be able to see each order of mammals as well as the information about an individual species on the same page. This way, the user could browse through the species in the order defined by us, or in whatever order they chose. The end result of this was a mock AJAX effect to display the species information without reloading the page. Web analytics analysis of the subsite revealed that many users were browsing the species, and in its first few months the Mammals of Washington pages ranked among the most visited within the Burke Museum site.

Process

The Burke Museum offered to host a website for the University of Washington Fish Collection, who had been hosting their own site for 10 years. In moving the old site to the new one, I had to interview UW Fish Collection staff to find out how they envisioned the new site to look. Additionally, I examined the old taxonomy and structure of the site and tried to translate it into our Collections taxonomy in a way that allowed them to retain some of their uniqueness while remaining in line with the other Burke sites. I then created new pages for the older content that were in the style of the Burke Museum.

Old and new taxonomy.