Case studies
How a complex website became easier to use and more effective.
Imperial War Museums, UK
A family of five museums uncovering the causes, course and consequences of war, from the First World War through to present-day conflict.
Services: User research, UX research, User testing, Co-analysis, Experience design, Mentoring, Consultancy
Delivered: 2018 – ongoing
The ask.
The IWM includes five different museums and historic sites, a research institute, learning activities and a large and diverse collection. That’s a complex offer for any website to handle. IWM wanted to find a long-term User Research partner as part of their ongoing digital transformation, to improve the effectiveness and the experience of the website.
The answer.
A long-term programme enables an organisation to be more strategic with their research (and budget) over multiple years. We worked with the IWM to identify individual pieces of research that both identified quick wins and built on one another to give the IWM team a better understanding of their multiple audiences and how their digital estate can support them.
We have been able to deliver and prioritise insights to the team in ways that have helped them address both immediate issues and build business cases – internally and for funders – to support the larger more strategic challenges.
Kirsty Bennet, User Experience Manager, explains:
“We’ve been working with FG+W for over 2 years on a wide range of user research. It changed how we looked at our audiences and how they used our site.
Through their research, FG+W helped us focus on the things that mattered to our audiences in ways that could deliver on our organisational goals, increase users’ understanding of our offer and improve their experience. They showed us how the website navigation was impacting our ability to deliver on those things, particularly in our ability to raise awareness of our venues and drive more visitors.”
The approach.
Over the programme we’ve worked with multiple teams of stakeholders. We made sure to address their questions and concerns so as to ensure their buy in for any design or content changes. By bringing people together, we could give them a voice and make sure it was heard.
This long-term programme of work has seen us deliver several research projects each year. These enabled us to connect what visitors said with what they did and carry out investigations into user groups as diverse as academics, commercial researchers, visit planners, teachers and members.
We used a variety of techniques
- Quantitative surveys
- Analysis of analytics
- Detailed user interviews
- UX testing using both quantitative and qualitative tools
- Service design
This has, most recently, been seen in the design of new navigation, where we were able to pull all of this experience together and apply it, leading to significant improvements in user ratings.
The outcome.
Our process has helped the IWM team embrace the complexity of its online and social offers. Our user-centred approach continues to give them crucial insights to make informed decisions. And because people from across the organisation are involved, the wider team has a growing sense of purpose and focus for its online offer.
–Kirsty Bennet, User Experience Manager, Imperial War Museums
“This more user-centred approach helped us identify pain points and prioritise them for action. For example, seeing how audiences went about finding information helped us step into their shoes and understand how to name different areas of the site. The work has also helped get buy-in to the approach from stakeholders.
We’re just completing another web survey and we’re seeing an overall increase in users’ rating of the website, and a significant increase in those who are planning a visit. In the meantime, we’ve had great feedback from internal stakeholders, particularly customer services who have seen a drop in enquiries around how to find certain things on the website.”
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