Wellcome – Digital platform
Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library in London that aims to challenge how we all think and feel about health. I worked across two embedded teams within Digital Engagement to extend Wellcome Collection’s reach through the development of a digital platform to support the venue, editorial content and accessibility of the collections.
UI, UX, Design Systems, WCAG2.1
Discoverability
Having a single code based open up the possibilities of linking content from the collections with the public programme and editorial content through multiple entry points. It would also expose parts of the website users may not typical visit and reinforce the perception of Wellcome Collection being one integrated resource rather than separate websites.
Cards
Originally introduced to promote events, exhibitions and articles, the taxonomy expanded to accommodate: videos, online only events, multi-part series, festivals and topics. Cards associated with topics and serials introduced an increased density of information being associated with multiple types of content. This would enable an augmented discoverability of content through browsing.
Search
The challenge was how to incorporate both a global and a collection based search which would feel natural for a public programme focussed browser as well as an experienced researcher.
The search results were distributed across tabs, each tab having a relevant set of filters to refine the search further. Searching from the global navigation prioritised public programme content whilst researchers more used to searching from the collections section would be shown collections results by default. In both cases, having a consistent set of tabs exposed users to content they may not habitually be aware of and allowed them to browse across a wide range of formats without losing safe ground.
Works page
Being representative of the available data, the works page which was initially simple, went through many iterations in a beta stage gradually building on layers of richness as data became available. The last iteration aimed to maintain the paradigm of keeping a lot of complex information contextual, this was informed by feedback from experienced researcher’s browsing methods. The tabbed approach established in search was reused, mitigating the need to relearn browsing patterns.
