Retrospect of National Museum of Singapore (NMS) Case Study

Kelly Koh
Kelly Koh
Sep 7, 2018 · 4 min read

It has been a year since my team and I did a redesign case study of National Museum of Singapore (NMS) as a project for General Assembly.

The good news is… the website has been redesigned and I am happy to validate that the current redesigned site has many similar features that we recommended in the case study.

Home page

“Old” NMS Homepage
“Old” NMS Footer
Redesigned page (for case study) vs Current page
  1. Simplified menu for easy navigation
  • Old: There were 10 headers in the menu with users not knowing the difference among “Exhibition”, “Programmes” and “For Families”.
  • Redesign: We recommended the use of active word to keep close to users’ job to be done (mainly to search for visiting time, what’s happening).
  • Current: Simplified information architecture (IA) to 5 categories. While “Our Exhibition” and “Our Programmes” remained, the information is now presented in a card-like layout which states very clearly that it is either an exhibition or programme.

2. Simplified carousel to 3 features

  • Old: Had 10 sliders which make users unsure on which are the highlighted exhibitions/ programmes
  • Redesign & Current: 3 sliders, focusing on the main exhibitions/programmes that NMS would like to feature.

3. Location and visiting time are stated clearly in the primary real estate of the screen

  • Old: Information was only found in “Visit”
  • Redesign: Visiting information is placed clearly on mid section of the main page
  • Current: Similarly, placed in the mid section of the main page with good use of inverse colour to bring out the address and opening time.

4. Curated social media to showcase a glimpse of the museum (useful for tourist who is one of our identified persona).

  • Old: a large area is used to showcase Instagram photos
  • Redesign: We trimmed the social media portion to a smaller area and added testimonials from 3rd party source (Tripadvisor).
  • Current: Display of NMS social media, allowing users to follow them and get updates from the various social medias. Addition validation with a ““Travellers’ Choice” from Tripadvisor at the footer.

5. Clear Sitemap

  • Old: Featured and linked out to other museums rather than the site information
  • Redesign & Current : IA featured clearly for better internal navigation.

Exhibition and Programme Page

Redesigned page (for case study) vs Current page
  1. Display of all exhibits and programs
  • Old: Displayed in tabs with “Current”, “Upcoming”, “Past” and “Permanent”. A calendar on the right which seemed to be marked (in orange) for all days.
  • Redesign: Display of all the exhibits and programs in card based UI, with filter to sort based on keywords (e.g. Family”)
  • Current: Similar card based UI to showcase all exhibit or programs with more filtering criteria.

Exhibit/ Programmes details page

“Old” Exhibition details page
Redesigned page (for case study) vs Current page
  1. Key information displayed upfront
  • Old, Redesigned and Current: This is something that was retained among the 3 layouts with emphasis on location, opening and closing time and admission cost.

2. Recommendations of other activities

  • Old: No recommendation given. User had to click back to view other exhibits
  • Redesigned and Current: Recommendation given to guide users on the happenings in the museum

Happy to see that most of our redesigned features were reflected in the current NMS website — a sense of validation on our user research!

I do hope there is a work-in-progress to also implement the “Plan My Trip” feature that we recommended, together with service design recommendation in our case study.

Nevertheless, the current NMS website is great and I wish NMS do get more local and international visitors with this current website :).

Kelly Koh

Written by

Kelly Koh

UX designer / Ex- Product Manager in Financial Services. Enjoys simplifying complex flows and always on a lookout to test out new apps/sites ! uxkellykoh.com

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