Local Heritage Hub (part of Historic England) will provide dedicated pages and bring together images and information about every city in England, allowing users to find out more about their local area.
Project Summary
My role in the project included:
- Creating high-fidelity wireframes
- Working with third-party agencies and assisting with preparation for user testing
- Adapting designs based on user testing outcome
- Creating accessible prototypes
- Presenting designs to stakeholders
Project Goal
”Engage target audience with relevant content, and provide a consistent user experience while maintaining accessibility standards.
Problem statement
Historic England’s audience are heritage professionals. This project aimed to attract novices and those with little interest in heritage, while not alienating their traditional audiences. Research into the new audience sectors and brand modernisation were critical for this project.
Design Process
To understand the new users further, we collaborated with the content and UX team to investigate what the users responded best to.
To get the most accurate results from user testing, we started off by testing mobile designs. The components focused on:
- Content categorisation to make complex content easy to understand. This was also popular with our traditional audience sectors.
- Timeline. A text-heavy page would not attract new audiences, so a more visual approach was used.
- Interactivity. Google Maps helped to create self-guided tours to increase interaction with heritage.
- Accessibility. To comply with the accessibility standards and create a design for all, I looked at legibility, harmonic colour combinations and colour contrast tests before user testing specific colours.
User Testing & Ideation
The users responded well to components with large photographs, interactive components, short text, and bright colours. The users also disliked categorised content and preferred explorative components.
The next step was to wireframe pages with explorative components to explore what functionality users preferred such as:
- Horizontal scrolling
The audience are exploratory users, so horizontal scrolling seemed a great way to not overload the user while still giving them the option to find out more. - Related results
To increase the engagement with heritage. Related results provided related options (neighbouring cities and counties) and an easy way to navigate to more content.
User Journey Testing
The next user testing session looked at the user journeys and content. The aim of each user journey was to get the user to a page that was relevant to them.
As a result, we included relevant recommendations on a search results page to help increase engagement if a specific result was not found.
Outcome
This project created colourful and bold design which is contrary to what is on the site currently, but is still in the R&D phase.
As a result, the main website will need to rebrand in order to maintain a consistent user journey and keep the audiences on the site for longer.
