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Textile Museum of Canada: Website IA and Nav Design

A website design project addressing the needs of users and stakeholders as outlined by the Textile Museum’s Digital Marketing Coordinator and the Community Engagement and Outreach Coordinator.

Image of the Textile Museum in their Reuse Room. Books are organized and there are fabrics organized by colour.
  • Sector
  • Client
  • Team
  • Tools
  • My Role
  • Arts & Culture
  • Textile Museum of Canada (Graduate-level course project for Information Architecture, UofT)
  • Nadia Mariyan Smith, Annie Chen (UX), Justin Abando (UX), Meera Lafir (UX)
  • Figma, Optimal Workshop, Dynomapper, Mrio
  • I led the secondary research phase; collaborated on the website crawl and content inventory; conducted card sorting sessions and tree tests (planning & execution); collaborated on designing the information architecture (IA) and IA diagram; and collaborated on designing the wireframes and task flows.
The Textile Museum of Canada
The only museum in Canada delivering programs and exhibitions dedicated solely to textile arts.
Challenge
Design the website's navigation and information architecture to create an intuitive and engaging user experience, ensuring seamless exploration of the website’s diverse content while accommodating user and stakeholder needs.
We followed five phases in our design process:
Research
Analysis
Ideation
Test
Prototype
Research
My classmates and I had an initial meeting with The Textile Museum’s Digital Marketing Coordinator and the Community Engagement & Outreach Coordinator.

I identified the primary user groups and stakeholders and highlighted the objectives, high-level requirements and success measurements for the website design, and discussed them with my team.
Users and their Goals
Museum Visitors: Access information about visiting the museum, buying tickets, taking tours, attending workshops, exhibitions, programs and events.

Donors: Easily donate to the museum and understand why their donation matters.

Artists: Learn about upcoming exhibitions, events and programs that they can be part of, contribute to blog posts, and look up information about upcoming grants and funding (e.g. for minority groups and emerging artists).

Marginalized Communities: Understand the museum’s genuine commitment to working with and showcasing work made by marginalized communities.


Researchers: Access the museum's collections, library, and other educational materials and learn more about textiles.
Stakeholders and their Needs
The Textile Museum of Canada: Fulfill its mission as a cultural institution to preserve and showcase textile art and engage with the community.

Community Members: The preservation of textile art as a means to conserve collective heritage, accessible opportunities to view and engage with textile art through exhibitions, programs, and events, and understand the museum's genuine commitment to working with and showcasing work made by marginalized communities.

Donors: See the impact of their contributions.

Artists: Recognition and promotion of their work.

Partners: Collaborate on exhibitions, events, programs, or other joint initiatives and contribute expertise, resources, or support to strengthen the impact of shared projects.

Researchers: Access to comprehensive collections and research materials.
Objectives
1. Improve Navigation: Ensure that users can easily access a wide range of content that is currently hard to find, such as past programs, featured artists, and work with underrepresented groups.

2. Improve Actionability: Make donations, ticket purchasing and booking tours more obvious.

3. Ensure Scalability: Design the website’s architecture with scalability in mind, allowing for future growth without the need for significant redevelopment.
High-Level Requirements
1. A place to show work with marginalized communities: Create a dedicated section highlighting the museum’s ongoing initiatives with marginalized communities, emphasizing authenticity and longevity.

2. Page to pitch work to donors: Develop a compelling and informative page aimed at donors, featuring impact reports and success stories. Showcase the museum's achievements and the positive outcomes of donor contributions.

3. Feature partnering artists & agencies: Showcase collaborating artists and agencies to encourage greater outreach and foster a sense of community and collaboration.

4. Optimize blog section: Develop a scalable blog platform that allows for easy content management, updates, and future expansion. Ensure the blog serves as a dynamic tool for the museum and participating artists to engage with the audience.

5. Easily sort through past exhibitions/events/programs: Introduce an improved sorting mechanism to allow users to easily filter and navigate through past programming including the recordings of digital programs.
Success Measurements
Website Engagement (Google Analytics): Increase in the number of visitors staying on the website for more than 2 minutes and reduced bounce rate, indicating improved user engagement.

Online Ticketing & Donations: Increase in online ticket sales compared to data from 2022 and increase in the number and amount of donations.

Engagement with Community and Artists: Increase in submissions and blog engagement from artists, increased engagement from underrepresented communities, and higher participation in community-focused events and programs.

Feedback and Surveys: Positive feedback from users regarding the website's usability and high satisfaction scores in post-visit surveys and artist/community feedback.
Analysis
I analyzed the content currently on the website by creating a content inventory list and conducting card sorting tests.
Content Inventory
To analyze the content inventory for Textile Museum Canada we conducted a website crawl, cleaned up the data, and analyzed the content by target group.
Website Crawl
I conducted a website crawl using the Dynomapper tool and created a content inventory list of all of the pages on the website (including the domains of the main site, shop, collections, and blog).
Data Clean-Up
I reviewed, organized, and refined the information collected from the website crawl to ensure that the data used for analysis is accurate, relevant, and free from inconsistencies.
Final Content Inventory List
A final content inventory list was created with 329 pages associated with the Textile Museum.
Excerpt of final content inventory list
Recommendations
  • Dedicated section on the website specifically for artists.
  • Re-design the TXTilecity tool and re-locate it to the “learning’” section.
  • Updating the content and visual design across all Cloth & Clay pages and relocating them to the "learning" section.
  • The creation of a dedicated page to showcase the work of Underrepresented Communities.
Card Sort
The aim was to understand users' categorization preferences and thought processes to inform the information architecture design.
Testing Plan
  • 48 cards based on the content inventory created on Miro for sorting.
  • Open-sort allowing participants to organize content items into categories of their choosing.
  • Think aloud protocol and probing questions to understand thought processes.
Participants
I conducted 2 out of 8 card sorting sessions with participants not familiar with the Textile Museum of Canada's website, as representative of general users who are not experts of the website.
Clear Groupings
Based on the conducted card sorts, the following group labels came up for most participants:
  • About Us
  • Visitor Information
  • Learn
  • Donate
  • Shop
Screenshot of two grouping sessions on Miro
Challenges
Based on the card sorting notes, the participants encountered some challenges with some cards across the board:
  • Blog Articles
  • Indigenous Fashion Futurities Event
  • ​​Indigenous Works
  • Skirt/Shaman’s Cloth
  • Collections and Gallery (v​​s. Current Exhibitions)
  • Featured Artists
  • Programs (including Current Programs, Upcoming Programs, and Past Programs)
  • Social Beings + Themes
Ideate
We designed a first draft of the information architecture
based on the results from the content crawl and card sorting sessions.
First Draft of IA Diagram
    Level 1
    Reflect labeled groups identified by participants during card sorting.
    Level 2-3
    Reflect the frequency that participants associated specific content under each respective category.
    Test
    We asked participants to test out our information architecture
    The aim was to evaluate user navigation and task completion, shedding light on both successful paths and areas for potential improvement within our first iteration of the information architecture design. The insights from the tree testing results influenced our final design decisions, prompting adjustments to enhance the information architecture and navigation design.
    Tree Testing Plan
    • 6 tasks using Treejack on Optimal Workshop.
    • 33 test links send out by the team to representative users.
    • The tree tests were done in an unmoderated setting.
    Participants
    33 participants were chosen based on their qualifications as users with little to no experience of the Textile Museum Canada’s website, as to be representative of general users who are not experts on the website.
    Tree Test Tasks
      • Museum Visitors: Purchase a general admission adult ticket valid for next Wednesday.
      • Museum Visitors: Look up a piece of textile art “baby blanket”.
      • Museum Visitors: Sign up to attend a quilt-making workshop run.
      • Artist: Submit an article for the museum’s online blog.
      • Underrepresented Communities: Find out about work being done with a nonprofit agency’s Triangle Program (a high school program that hosts  LGBTQ2+ youth who are in need of a smaller and safer space where they can find and build community).
      • Researchers: Research and read about the history of Indigenous artists in Canada.
      Screenshot of the tree test that we created on Treejack
      Tree Test Results
          • 1. Purchase a general admission adult ticket.
          • Correct Destination (73%)
            ‍Incorrect Destinations (27%)
          • 2. Look up a piece of textile art "baby blanket".
          • Correct Destination (88%)
            ‍Incorrect Destinations (12%)
          • 3. Sign up to attend a quilt-making workshop.
          • Correct Destination (85%)
            ‍Incorrect Destinations (15%)
          • 4. Submit an article for the museum’s online blog.
          • Correct Destination (79%)
            ‍Incorrect Destinations (21%)
          • 5. Find out about work being done with a nonprofit agency’s Triangle Program.
          • Correct Destination (24%)
            ‍Incorrect Destinations (76%)
          • 6. Purchase a general admission adult ticket.
          • Correct Destination (55%)
            ‍Incorrect Destinations (45%)
          We listened to participants and made changes to the IA:
          Final Draft of the IA Diagram
          Prototype

          Taking into account the IA diagram and intended features of the website, the navigation design was prototyped on Figma for both desktop and mobile sizes.
          A first look at the culmination of our research, analysis and ideation:
          Desktop Navigation
            Mobile Navigation
              Next Steps
              More User Testing
              Further user testing is recommended to validate and confirm the final iteration of the information architecture.
              High Fidelity Prototyping
              Accurately simulate the user interface, interactions, and visual elements, allowing for refinement before final implementation.
              Takeaways
              Importance of User Testing at the Forefront
              Just because I, as a designer, believe information should be organized in a certain way, it only holds true so long as the user tests validate those assumptions. The importance of user testing was highlighted in our tree tests where there was significant failure rates.
              Presenting to Clients
              We had 5 minutes to present a final report to the Textile Museum CEO and Digital Marketing Coordinator. I learned to be concise in my narrative and in my slides and to focus on the most important aspects of the final design.
              Photo of the team collaborating on a shared Miro board during a meeting

              Thank you for following along on my design journey!

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