Chicago History Museum
Objective
In the Spring of 2022, executives at The Chicago History Museum came to us at Clique Studios to modernize their site’s user experience to drive advocacy, memberships, and visits in this period coming out of the pandemic.
What did their site visitors think?
After meeting with stakeholders, I created a quick survey to get feedback and got responses from roughly a quarter of the museum’s email list.
Takeaways:
Visual Feedback
Users wanted a more dynamic, enriching experience with an updated visual language that better mirrors the rich history of Chicago.
Accessibility, specifically regarding color & contrast, should be a high priority, especially for their most loyal, older users with vision limitations.
Customer Recognition
Paying members want personalization and ways to be recognized.
User Orientation & Freedom
Usage of subdomains and external links caused disorientation, they could benefit from breadcrumbs and smarter interlinking.
Users would benefit from a “Buy Tickets” CTA on the homepage as an accelerator.
Other key processes like “Become a Member” should have accelerators also.
The current ticketing process is too text-heavy and needs better information hierarchy. One in five site visitors felt the ticket purchasing process wasn’t intuitive. This will require more of a deep dive later.
What are their competitors doing?
While waiting one week for survey results to come in, I ran a competitive analysis to create a shared understanding of their landscape and gather design inspiration for our team.
How can we streamline their ticketing process?
If Chicago History Museum was going to drive more profit, its site’s ticketing flow would need to be streamlined. They were driving to a customizable 3rd party ticketing platform, Altru, to manage transactions.
To identify improvements, I diagrammed a series of flowcharts illustrating the steps that a user would take to purchase a ticket on their site as well as the sites of museums also using Altru.
How did we do?
From our launch in August 2022 to July 2023 compared to the same period from 2021 to 2022:
14.06% increase in returning site visitors
10.68% increase in mobile visitors
Our redesign not only improved & streamlined user experience but drove higher engagement and delivered tangible business value.
The rest is history!
