National Museum of African American History and Culture [NMAAHC]

WEBBY NOMINATED 2022

The museum asked our team to build out a digital version of their exhibits that can be easily searched through. The intent was to focus on lifelong learners, students and educators who may be using this platform for their work.

Part of this digital transformation required us to build a Timeline feature, similar to their physical timelines in the museum, that showcased all the curated content for any given major event in African American history.

The Problem

The primary issue with this initial timeline design was the lack of consideration of the scale of historical content that would be applied to this component. A previous designer already designed one, but it did not satisfy the requirements from the curation team.

While it did look good, the design also was found to not be usable - particularly by our life-long learners user group.

The curation team also had a major problem with this design because some of the text on the images covered, or partially covered, people’s faces. Out of respect, this was an issue the curators were highly sensitive about.

Stakeholders

The primary stakeholders for this project were the NMAAHC's Product Owner, and Curation team. On our side, they were my scrum team which included my Tech Lead, Content Strategist and myself.

Site Visit

Since I was brought on the team to help redesign this, I thought it was a great opportunity for me to start from the ground up. The team and I decided to go on a site visit to view this exhibit, and for me to study the physical timeline.

Getting Buy-in

Since we’ve already spent so much time on this Timeline component before I even joined the project, this redesign was seen as a risk in terms of the amount of additional design and development time needed. It was important to get the curators’ confidence.
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I interviewed many of the curators individually to get a deeper understanding of what they required, and what would be nice to have for them in this new Timeline experience.

High Level Requirements:

1. New experience needs to be designed for scale
2. Extremely easy and intuitive way to navigate through the timeline.
3. Usable enough for life-long learners

Nice to haves:
1. An overview of the full timeline and a signifier of the given position a user is currently in

Wireframes & Template System

To solve the main problem of accounting for scale, I designed a template system that allowed curators a series of options per event(s). Some events simply contained an image and its story, others had a significant call out or a quotation that needed to be easily displayed. You can see all the templates (for Desktop) below.

High Fidelity

Outcome

This template system tremendously helped the curators organize their content in simple, yet diverse ways, and also the developers with planning their development. As a result, the customer was happy, and we were still able to hit our internal deadline of finishing the development of this by the time our next exhibit, Making a Way Out of No Way, releasing in June 2022.

If you’d like to see more of the Timeline UI and Prototype, please don’t hesitate to contact me.