The Academy of Natural Sciences Website
A modern and responsive web design for the Academy of Natural Sciences’ new brand direction with a focus on storytelling and personalization.
The Directive
Modernize the website, while giving the digital team at the academy the support to focus more on their publishing efforts.
My Role
Lead UX designer and Art Director. Lead the UX direction and wire-framing effort while training a junior designer on web practices and process.
Challenges
To replicate on the web the museum’s hands-on and personal experience between staff and visitors and to express this atmosphere without relying just on static photography. We also needed a user experience to reinforce the union of a visit-focused museum and a research-focused institution. Overall, we also needed to reduce the amount of pages and streamline the navigation.
To tackle the personal and interactive atmosphere of the museum’s website, we introduced subtle interactive elements like conversational filters and exposed topics to encourage exploration.
To pair the two aspects of the museum, our team lead with exhibitions and visit-focused content while weaving in user-friendly stories about the academy’s research and impact. We used landing pages as storytelling opportunities for a more general audience to enable them to dig deeper into audience-specific content.
To streamline the website’s content and organization, we reduced the overall amount of navigational items as well as introduced a hamburger menu that exposed top level pages for easy access.