The Textile Museum of Canada is the only museum in Canada devoted to the history and cultural relevance of textiles. They have a vast permanent collection, with many unique and wonderful items. Unfortunately, it was housed on a slow, out-dated system that made it difficult for people to find and explore the textiles.
They required a modern website — one that would allow the textiles in their collection to shine. They also house many exhibitions in their museum space in Toronto, so they needed to help patrons learn about current exhibitions and plan their visit.
After some research, we held a series of collaborative workshops with the Museum to determine the project objectives and KPIs. Using our findings from the research phase, as well as the details from the client workshops, we mapped out the information architecture. We used card sorting to ensure that the categories made sense to patrons.
The Museum had recently undergone a complete rebranding, and their online presence had yet to catch up. We used a mood board to figure out the design direction and to inform the final designs.
At this stage, we also started sketching potential templates. We wanted to make a flexible content management system that would make it easy for the Museum to keep their content current — they needed to be able to feature upcoming exhibitions and events, to talk about interesting items in the collection, to encourage donations, and more. The wireframes map out the hierarchy of content and the functionality of this system.
We created a simple website — the Museum's beautiful textiles are the stars of the show. The permanent collection is housed on a new system that is faster and easier to navigate. The content system is very flexible, allowing the Museum to feature upcoming exhibitions, events and programs or items from the permanent collection. They have a new event calendar that makes it easy for patrons to stay on top of what's happening at the Museum. The website is optimized for a wide variety of screen sizes so that people can browse the content on-the-go, and plan their next visit to the Textile Museum from anywhere.
Information architecture and wireframes, user experience and usability, responsive design
The Textile Museum of Canada