Increasing Discoverability and Improving Navigation for the Terra Foundation

This project was a collaborative effort between the Pratt Center for Digital Experiences and the Terra Foundation. The objective of this project was to assist Terra Foundation in solving UX issues on their website using a research-based approach. By using Google Analytics, we were able to analyze the website's performance metrics and Hotjar was used to examine the behavior of the users. We have identified several key areas of improvement that can be made to the navigation and information hierarchy of the site in order to improve its overall usability based on these metrics.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

The Problem

Terra Foundation for American Art has been one of the leading foundations dedicated to supporting American art with offices in Chicago and Paris. Through their grant program, collection, and initiatives, they promote and expand the narratives of American art and encourage collaborative practices. The foundation has recently revamped its mission and vision to be more inclusive and diverse in its methodology. They wish to reiterate this new mission in their website design through deliberate modification. Additionally, they have upgraded their collections platform and redesigned their landing page.

The Problem with the current website is that a lot of crucial information on the site is hard to discover. Through our research, we were able to identify several key findings and make recommendations based on those findings.

WHO IS TERRA FOUNDATION?

RESEARCH TEAM

  • Consisted of 4 User Experience Researchers working with stakeholders.

MY ROLE

UX Researcher

My role on the team as a UX Researcher included researching newly designed pages on the site and analyzing how effectively users can navigate through the site.

Tools Utilized:

  • Google Analytics

  • Hotjar

  • Figma / FigJam

MEETING WITH TERRA FOUNDATION

We kicked off the project by having an initial meeting with Terra Foundation. During our meeting we asked them a series of questions about their goals and objectives for working with us. Additionally, we discussed logistics about how the project would be executed. We gained valuable insight into what they ultimately hoping to achieve from this project, which was to improve usability on the site and test the newly redesigned pages.

Process

OUR RESEARCH QUESTIONS

Following our meeting with Terra Foundation, we formulated a series of research questions which we refined throughout the project.

GOALS & OBJECTIVES

METHODOLOGY

Results

NAVIGATION ISSUES:

INFORMATION HIERARCHY:

CONVERSION RATE OPTIMIZATION:

Conclusions

Presenting Findings to Clients / Stakeholders

Following the completion of our Research, we met with our clients via Zoom and presented a slide deck to them laying out our Findings and Recommendations. Our analysis was well received by the team at Terra Foundation

What’re the Next Steps?

• Run A/B testing with the plan we laid out using Google Optimize:

Click here to view complete Slide Deck in Figma