No time for the details? Click through the summary slider below to understand my key contributions and takeaways.
The "It's About Time" Online Museum Project transformed a physical museum into a digital experience. Led by Atera from 2020-2022, this project aimed to create an engaging online platform for museum visitors.
The challenge was to convert a traditional physical museum experience into an accessible and interactive digital format, likely in response to the global pandemic's impact on in-person visits.
UX Research Consultant
The project successfully launched, providing an engaging online museum experience. It received positive feedback from users and stakeholders, effectively maintaining the museum's educational mission during the pandemic.
What went right:
What went wrong:
In August 2021, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) approached me with a challenge: convert their “Mobile Museum” physical exhibition into an online experience.
The project aimed to encourage students to question historical narratives through an avant-garde, experimental exhibition methodology. However, the COVID-19 pandemic had forced a halt to the physical exhibition.
For a year, the team had struggled to translate their innovative physical experience into a digital format. Despite their efforts, they found themselves at an impasse.
The team realized that to successfully transition “It's About Time” into a virtual space, they needed to find a way to preserve the interactive and thought-provoking nature of the original concept while leveraging the unique possibilities of digital media.
They released a tender, looking for a consultant with user experience design, and exhibition design expertise. This brought them to my attention, and allowed me to begin interviewing the team to learn more about their goals, and challenges for this new iteration o the museum.
The project aims to fill gaps in historical knowledge by showcasing personal experiences and perspectives often overlooked in mainstream sources and school textbooks. It particularly focuses on Sri Lanka's post-independence era, an area often underrepresented in formal history education.
The museum was structured around four key questions:
Through interactive exhibits and user contributions, “It's About Time” offered an evolving museum experience. The digital transformation, necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic, enabled wider accessibility, allowing visitors to explore exhibits safely from their homes while supporting broader reconciliation efforts.
To address these challenges, I implemented a series of collaborative online workshops using Miro's virtual workspace.
These workshops were designed to take place 2–3 times per week over the course of one month. The choice of online collaboration was necessitated by the ongoing pandemic restrictions.
I chose this approach for several reasons:
Our first step was to simplify the personas the team had previously created. I found that they were getting bogged down in edge cases and had only vague understandings of what they wanted users to experience.
We stripped down the personas to essential, action-oriented information. This process involved:
This simplification helped the team focus on the most important aspects of the user experience, rather than getting lost in hypothetical scenarios.
We made 4 major changes to achieve this:
Now, we could finally move into the meat of our process. I selected a series of structured brainstorming exercises to help the team iterate through ideas.
The exercises we agreed on were:
This structured approach helped the team overcome their biggest obstacle; exploring ideas in high-enough fidelity to overcome analysis paralysis, and design experiences that reflect their original vision.
This was the most important, and consequential stage because this was where the team got to translate their exhibition ideas and constraints into actual designs.
In order to help the team explore their ideas fruitfully, I gave the team a library of prebuilt wireframing components, and designing for mobile first.
I said “these are your Lego blocks; let's go through each high-voted idea and theme, and build them out”.
I assigned each team member an exhibit and tasked them with producing low-fidelity wireframes. By supporting the team's initial struggles, each member generated rough screens which I helped flesh out.
From these initial sketches, I worked to expand and refine the concepts. This involved:
After several rounds of exploration, we had eliminated narrowed down into the most impactful features and their exhibits
By the time we reached the mid-fidelity stage, we:
With our low fidelity designs completed, the team had strong-enough ideas on what the overall experience would feel like, so with Mid-fidelity designs, our biggest overarching goals were to:
These 2 stages resulted in the team achieving far deeper understanding and consensus of the technical constraints, image and copywriting content requirements, CMS design considerations, and many more 'gnitty-gritty' details that would only have been considered after the platform was developed and too late to change.
.gif)
We spent the remaining weeks working with the development team to bring this website to life, run a few rounds of usability testing,
After usability testing with 5 participants, comprised of exhibition design specialists, educators and laymen, we identified several core usability issues that were critical, and could be fixed before release.
The final version of the website reflected the team's aesthetics, values, and experiential vision; with each exhibit using a differente core feature to communicate its main message.
As I reflect on our journey to bring the museum online, I'm struck by both our successes and the hurdles we faced. We definitely hit some high points:
But we also ran into some tough spots:
Even with these bumps in the road, it was amazing to see how our team's creativity and teamwork turned a physical museum into an engaging online experience. We proved that with the right approach, even the toughest design challenges can be overcome.
As I reflect on our journey to bring the museum online, I'm struck by both our successes and the hurdles we faced. We definitely hit some high points:
As for issues, there were a few notable issues we had to work around: