Valley House Gallery, a celebrated Dallas high-end art gallery known for its beautiful physical venue, encountered a significant challenge: its online presence failed to reflect its high-end reputation and provide an immersive, user-friendly experience. This gap between the physical and digital realms underscored the urgent need for a website redesign to make the art collection accessible and engaging for online visitors. The initiative focused on aligning the digital experience with the gallery's esteemed status, leveraging heuristic analysis and competitive benchmarking to identify critical usability issues and opportunities for enhancement.
As the UX Researcher and Designer on this project, I played a crucial role in transforming the gallery's digital interface into an inviting and intuitive platform, effectively bridging the gap between art enthusiasts and the works they seek to explore online. This was accomplished through creating wireframes, site mapping, card sorting, developing a visual design system, and a high-fidelity prototype, all underpinned by extensive user research and usability testing, which led to improved design iterations
Through four rounds of open card sorting, participants were tasked with categorizing website content. This iterative process led to the development of a user-informed navigation bar, streamlining the site's layout and enhancing user navigation.
The insights from card sorting directly informed the website's sitemap. The site's information architecture was significantly simplified by organizing related topics into distinct pages. This strategic grouping tackled the critical issues of information overload and clutter, which had been major pain points in the original design.
The wireframing stage involved using Adobe XD to craft layouts for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. Initial wireframe versions were critiqued, leading to successive iterations that refined the design. These wireframes addressed user concerns regarding information overload and lack of content hierarchy by clearly sectioning and grouping related information, thus facilitating a more intuitive navigation experience.
The final design phase brought the Valley House Gallery's vibrant and sophisticated essence into the digital realm. A carefully selected color palette and elegant typography mirrored the gallery's physical ambiance, offering a digital experience that speaks to the quality of art and curation the gallery is known for. The design strategy focused on showcasing the art, reducing text-heavy pages to let the visuals dominate the conversation.
Usability testing on the prototype highlighted a critical issue: a lack of navigational consistency and cues.To address this, enhancements were made to improve user orientation by integrating page headers and adjusting the navigation bar's color state to reflect the current page, reinforcing user choices.
Another identified issue was the "My Favorites" page, which lacked navigational clarity and felt too similar to other pages, confusing users. The revised design introduced a minimalist approach, focusing solely on user-selected artworks and a clear path to browsing or adding items to the cart.
Moving forward, the project will focus on extensive usability testing and A/B testing to refine the user experience further. These efforts aim to identify the most effective design variations for different user segments, ensuring a seamless and engaging digital experience.
This redesign project successfully transformed an outdated website into a visually appealing and user-friendly digital space that reflects the elegance and sophistication of the Valley House Gallery. The new design not only enhances the user experience but also aligns the website's branding and personality with the gallery's esteemed reputation.
The journey of redesigning the Valley House Gallery website imparted several invaluable lessons:
The project's success was significantly bolstered by an iterative approach, allowing for constant refinement based on user input. This methodology is crucial for enhancing usability and achieving design excellence.
Simplifying the site's structure and emphasizing visual content over text dramatically improved user engagement. This approach reaffirmed the effectiveness of minimalist design principles in facilitating better navigation and understanding.
The implementation of consistent and intuitive navigation cues was a key factor in improving user orientation within the website, underscoring the importance of clear and coherent navigation in user experience design.
TillerXR shifted who they serve with their initiative to create a new software, and this triggered a need for a full brand re-vamp and website redesign.
TillerXR, an Austin-based startup, faced challenges in effectively promoting its Virtual Tour Studio software due to usability and branding issues on its website, which failed to reflect the company's evolution and dual business model. The goal was to redesign the website to clearly showcase the software and the turnkey service, improving user experience and coherence in brand identity. My role encompassed conducting user research, designing the user interface, and developing the final website. This involved competitive research, user interviews, and usability testing to guide the redesign process, ultimately enhancing the website's functionality and establishing a stronger brand presence for TillerXR.
TillerXR stumbled upon significant hurdles related to usability and branding on its website. Initially, the old website was designed to showcase their full-service tour creation service; the website no longer aligned with TillerXR’s evolved business model and expanded offerings with their addition to tour creation software. This misalignment led to a diluted brand identity and a confusing user experience, deterring potential customers.
The primary goal was overhauling the website to seamlessly integrate the software and turnkey service offerings, streamlining the user journey. Enhancing the website's usability and coherence in brand identity was paramount to attracting and retaining customer interest. The process was driven by a thorough understanding of competitive landscapes and user expectations, underpinned by perceptual mapping to identify positioning gaps and opportunities.
TillerXR serves a varied professional user base within the real estate and hospitality sectors, from agents to event planners, all united by their need for innovative virtual tour technology. This group ranges from 25 to 55 years old, seeking to leverage virtual tours for enhanced marketing and engagement. They are innovators and tech enthusiasts looking for reliable, easy-to-integrate tools to produce captivating virtual experiences.
The core needs are user-friendly tools and seamless workflow integration, with a desire for immersive experiences that accurately represent their spaces. Challenges include navigating complex systems, insufficient support, and digital representation limitations.
Key personas exemplify our audience's spectrum:
This project was initiated with a feature prioritization for pages and content that would go into the website’s initial launch. To prioritize the features, I worked with key stakeholders using the personas created to help guide the activity. After the features were prioritized, a card sorting activity was conducted to help organize the website's main content, followed by creating a site map to serve as the foundation of the website redesign project. The main goal of this initial development was to organize the content to have a clear plan for developing wireframes.
With the the stakeholders we collaborated to prioritize pages to be created for the website redesign. I used MoSCoW analysis to help sort out what pages we must have, should have, and could have:
It was most important to ensure that the website prioritized both the Virtual Tour Studio software landing page and the Turnkey service. After the initial launch of the website, more in-depth pages could be developed, along with a plan to create a blog.
Wireframes were developed based on site mapping and feature prioritization, with the main goal of showcasing where the different content would be laid out. This process was designed to be iterative, with the aim of getting feedback on the website's structure to iterate it as needed before developing it further into final prototypes.
One of the main ideas for this phase of the project was to ensure a clear hierarchy and to make distinct sections that would break up the design and make it visually interesting. The focus for the wireframing portion of this project was mainly on desktop and the tablet and mobile wireframes should be developed in the near future.
The final designs were developed with the main goal of showing the actual content within the high-fidelity prototype. One of the main goals was to incorporate a dark theme into the website to support the techy theme of this start-up. In addition, the accent color purple was used to help tie in the brand and maintain consistency among the various pages.
Graphics were designed separately for this high-fertility prototype, and several iterations based on feedback were made to reach this final design before website development. These are the essential pages for the website's initial launch.
The TillerXR Website Redesign and branding project was met with excitement from users and stakeholders. The website was then fully developed and implemented into Webflow.
The next steps are to test the website given the tasks users would need to complete and ensure that the website is user-friendly and engaging. After testing, the website will be fully developed and implemented for this initial launch, and then immediately after, additional pages, such as a demo library and blog, will start to be prototyped.
