As an exercise I redesigned The National Gallery of Art’s website to increase usability, visitor appeal, and address the organization’s current needs
THE NATIONAL GALLERY’S GOALS
I started out by going through the NGA’s 2018-2022 Strategic Plan to learn about the museum’s organization goals and the main challenges it currently faces. Summarized, they are:
- Protect the gallery’s collections and maintain buildings and grounds.
- Educate the public and give increased access to the collection and educational resources
challenges facing the national gallery
The Strategic Plan also identified the factors that may prevent the NGA from achieving its goals. These are financial challenges that may be met with stronger fundraising efforts.
- Federal funding doesn’t keep up with costs.
- Fundraising by private donors is affected by the economy and competition from other cultural
- institutions. Lack of private financial support will result in cuts to exhibitions and NGA’s education/publishing programs.
REDESIGN GOALS
Taking the NGA’s goals and challenges into account, a website redesign may benefit the organization by…
- Getting more visitors to the NGA
- Making educational resources and collections more accessible and desirable to the public
- Increasing fundraising from donations and memberships
metrics of success
The Strategic Plan outlines several KPIs to measure how well the NGA is advancing its goals. These indicators are interactions by different target audiences (general visitor, academic, educator, organizations). I believe that designing an engaging and accessible website is a starting point for inviting a higher number of interactions across the board.
- Visitor counts for general and special exhibitions
- Comment Cards
- Usage statistics of libraries, services, archives, art information desk requests
- Requests for educational resources
- Requests to borrow works of arts or collaborate on exhibitions