Pritzker Military Museum & LibraryHONORING HISTORY WITH A FUTURE-FORWARD WEBSITE
The ask
The Pritzker Military Museum & Library’s (PMML) mission is to increase the public’s understanding of military history, military affairs and national security by providing a forum for the study and exploration of our military – past, present, and future - with a specific focus on their stories, sacrifices, and values. PMML tapped McGuffin to overhaul their website with a new design and user experience improvements with the goal of enhancing member experience, attracting new members, and driving donor contributions.
The answer
We began with the website foundation, by simplifying the sitemap, creating uniform nomenclature, improving search function and adding a new mega menu to improve the user experience and website functionality. By redesigning the website, we drastically improved page legibility with bold titles and paragraph styles to match the bold storytelling content. The result was a dramatically enhanced user experience and a fresh, bold new look that honors military history and its future.
What we did
- Search function enhancements
- User experience (UX) Enhancements
- Accessibility enhancements
- Information architecture
- Platform (Drupal) enhancements
- Wireframes
- Web design
Information Architecture
The PMML offers members and visitors access to an extensive collection of resources and military archives, part of the challenge was navigating and intuitively accessing relevant content. Following interviews with key internal stakeholders within the organization and reviewing the existing site structure, we made the following recommendations:
- Simplify and consolidate pages to reduce page count, reducing challenge of content access
- Improve nomenclature site-wide for better clarity, creating intuitive navigation
- Replace dropdown menu in main navigation with a mega menu for a quicker drill-down to tertiary level
Wireframes
After mapping out the website content and user flows, our team addressed the user interface. Our objective was to simplify the user experience by controlling the user journey with content engagement. We streamlined what, where, and how content was accessible, preventing content overload on pages. We reviewed the content structure of all web content templates and made the following recommendations:
- Simplify the design system, creating a more cohesive user experience
- Eliminate sliders site-wide, which hid content from users
- Minimize the use of large hero images, which push important content down on the page
- Enhance the scanability and readability of pages with high-contrasting styles and enlarge size of paragraph styles
- Create a new component system for displaying different types of content more effectively
