Jump To Section
Omeka S
Digital Scholar's Web-Publishing Platform
Empowering institutions & individuals to build digital exhibit websites quickly & easily
Impact Goals:
Conduct usability testing to pinpoint pain points & opportunities
Ideate designs to grow user retention & lower user drop-off rates
Refresh Omeka S's previous interface & bring back returning users
My Role:
Usability Testing & Iteration
User Research
UX/UI & Product Design
Hi-fi Prototyping
Tools:
Figma
Userlytics
UserTesting
Adobe Illustrator
Team:
2 UX/UI Designers (Me)
2 UX Researchers
Timeline:
Client Consulting Project
9 weeks (Oct 2024 - Dec 2024)
Design Overview
Revitalizing Omeka S: Easy, quick, and powerful site-building for all your digital exhibit needs
Omeka S wants to improve the usability of site-building features to increase number of active users and overall user engagement. However, the Omeka team have little past experience with formal UX research. This is where our team of UX design and research consultants come in! We hope to improve Omeka S by pinpointing and addressing current user pain points, as well as equip the Omeka team with new, innovative ideas to help bring Omeka S to new heights as a top-of-the-line cultural exhibits site-builder.
Before
After
Newly-refreshed modern interface enjoyed by new users & long-time Omeka enthusiasts alike!
Build pages, exhibits, or digital stories by adding & mixing different content blocks.
Create a fully-outlined website that matches your needs & vision with just a few clicks!
The Problem
Omeka S’s intimidating interfaces and complex navigation scare away new & beginning users
Omeka is a well-known name in the libraries, institutions, museums, and collections fields. In fact, many educational institutions introduce Omeka to their students as a platform for their assignments & projects. Therefore, Omeka has a dependable system for user acquisition. However, user retention is a whole different story...
Users believe it takes too much time and effort to build a website on Omeka in comparison to other site-builder platforms.
Beginner users are intimidated by the technical vocabulary and complex task flow needed to operate Omeka S.
User Research
Searching for current user pain points & opportunities to delight
In order to better understand what pain points are driving users away, our team conducted usability testing on the current Omeka S platform. We gathered a pool of 12 testers consisting both current and new Omeka users, and all users must have a background in digital collections, libraries, museums, or other related fields. We observed the main functionalities users generally engage with in order to build a website, and we noted any positive and negative experiences users encountered along the way.
4 Major Testing Insights
Users find Omeka’s interface to be outdated, untrustworthy, and overwhelming
Jargon-y, technical language & unclear feedback leaves users feeling lost & confused
Users want to see immediate feedback on their iterations when editing site pages
Users are strongly interested in existing theme options, but it’s not enough to make them stay
How might we reduce the technical obstacles and navigational friction users face while trying to build a website in order to increase user retention rates on Omeka S?
Brainstorm & Ideation
Building a website is already a lot of work for users, but rather than relieving that load, Omeka S currently contributes to its issues
Although the Omeka team’s mission is to make publishing collections and narrative exhibits to the web as easy as possible, our usability testing results found that they are falling short. New & current Omeka S users face several usability issues that contribute to stresses and frustrations they already commonly face when trying to build a new website.
So our team planned to first redesign Omeka S to relieve these usability issues, amplify current moments of delight, and come up with new ideas to drive long-term user retention. To do so, 4 design goals were brainstormed below:
Design Goal 1
Reimagine UI to feel more modern and beginner-friendly
Design Goal 2
Provide more assistance to new users throughout onboarding
Design Goal 3
Easier iterative-editing & simplify task flows for building pages
Design Goal 4
Make site-building process as fast and easy as possible
Solution 1
Refresh UI and replace text with more visuals to modernize look & feel
Solution 2
Equip users with tutorial tooltips & context overlays to guide new & learning users
Solution 3
Embed “live edit” view that matches what users expect published page to look like
Solution 4
New functionality to generate fully-outlined website templates for users
User Testing & Feedback
Ensuring re-designed prototypes effectively answered users’ concerns
To test the effectiveness of our proposed solutions, we conducted user testing on each iteration of our hi-fi prototypes. We interviewed users to see if they could successfully create and publish a new website, as well as to check if our redesigns led to higher user retention rates and more positive impressions of Omeka S. We also wanted to pinpoint and address any new pain points users may encounter while using our newly-introduced functionalities.
Change 1: Home page
Refresh UI and replace text with more visuals to ensure beginner-friendly interfaces
Change 2: Edit Site pages
Empower innovative “do-it-yourself” users with onboarding support
Change 3: "Live Edit" Previews
Embed a “Live Edit” view that immediately reflects user's iterative changes
Change 4: Site Template Generator
Introduce new “one-click site builder” generative features for fast & easy site-building
Interactive Prototype
Omeka S: Empowering institutions & individuals to build and publish digital exhibit websites quickly & easily
Try generating a website or build from scratch!
Takeaways
Starting from scratch, collecting user metrics from the ground up — The Omeka team and Digital Scholar organization are committed to keeping Omeka S open-source and free from user data collection and tracking. That means, our UX consulting team had to work with minimal prior user research and metrics. We knew that user research and usability testing would be vital for tracking down major pain points and deciding what aspects of Omeka S should be prioritized in our re-design. It was interesting and eye-opening to see that users were experiencing frustrations in aspects that the Omeka team didn’t initially foresee, and is a further lesson into why proper user research & testing is so essential for creating user-centered experiences.
Consulting vs. Designing — While working as a UX design consultant , I learned about the differences between consulting as an external designer versus ideating as an internal employee. Consultation can mean suggesting actions and changes to your client that they might believe to be outside their scope & capacity. But in doing so, we can encourage our client to broaden their world view and imagine the expansive possibilities & growth their product can experience. I believe this was a great learning experience for myself, to understand UX design from both internal and external perspectives.
Thank you to my team members: Nikhil, Radhika, and Xinyao (Charlene) for the lively and imaginative team dynamic we had while working together on this project; to Taylor for guiding us in our journey to broaden Omeka S’s potential; and to the Omeka team at Digital Scholar for this opportunity to help create an inspiring and revolutionary product!