Retrospect of National Museum of Singapore (NMS) Case Study
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



- 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

- 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


- 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 :).
