An immersive website experience that brings historic artifacts, exhibits, and generations together.
Reimagining a digital presence for one of the country’s largest naval military museums.
Project Overview
The Intrepid Museum was in need of a new digital presence that would put user experience first and better represent the fascinating finds waiting to be discovered inside their doors.
Work
Increase in overall traffic
Increase in revenue
increase in organic search traffic
Building Around the Brand
On the heels of a new rebrand that focused less on the military machinery and more on history, learning, and fun for the whole family, the Intrepid team wanted to ensure their new identity was reflected at every touchpoint. Our design team began exploring the different opportunities within our newly developing site structure that would allow us to incorporate the unique, visual nuances of their new brand. From micro-interactions like our CTA hover that mimics a jet stream coming out of the logo to a newly diversified color palette incorporated into the different page designs, we found creative ways to continually capture the new Intrepid branding throughout the site.
Streamlined Content Strategy & Copywriting
One of the biggest lifts of the project was to restructure Intrepid’s previous site content in a way that would more actively engage online visitors new and old. With a complete navigation overhaul, reimagined user flows and stronger calls to action, our content strategists and copywriters remained laser-focused on encompassing all that Intrepid has to offer.
Information architecture
After analyzing the 100+ page website, we unearthed content that was duplicative, overlapping and confusingly intertwined. This sparked the idea for a large-scale, master taxonomy system to optimize the user experience, and it became the starting point for the consolidation of five subdomains into the main site. This also systematically categorized all site content into core pillars of theme, audience, price and location. This advanced taxonomy gave the option to pull by tag into particular page modules, allowing us to enrich the page experience while continuing the user flow through related pages, events, courses, etc. We then created a sub-taxonomy for things like the educational courses Intrepid offers, to enable fast access for educators (one of Intrepid’s largest and most valuable audiences).
Content optimization
By incorporating better-formulated systems with cross-overs that continued user flows throughout the site and more clearly aligning copy with imagery, we optimized Intrepid’s site content to be more digestible. Then, we explored tabbed and dynamic components that organized information in an easy-to-use, mobile-friendly manner along with more compelling CTAs. The result is clearly organized information that’s easy to understand and exciting to explore.
Simplified storytelling
Over the years, the previous Intrepid Museum website had become an archived catalog of dated descriptions and exhibit information. Our copy team closely collaborated with Intrepid to gather updated exhibit details and historic background information needed to hit the ground running, distilling where necessary and re-telling the Intrepid story in a new way that appeals to a wider range of audiences.
Endless Exploration
Restructuring and writing the site copy was only half of the content restructuring ahead of us. With new tools and more compelling visuals, we continued to unpack the exciting history of The Intrepid Museum to keep users engaged.
Museum Map
In earlier stages of the project, ChatGPT was utilized in generating mock content for prototypes. We continually used ChatGPT to create interesting and descriptive texts, headlines, subheadings, and calls to action to help everyone envision how our messaging would fit within the different designs. By providing the design, development, and client teams with a more realistic and tangible sense of the space, feel, and layout, we were able to offer a better look at the approach, tone, and length of our desired messaging while providing more effective high-fidelity designs and interactive prototypes.
Next-Level Tech Stack
One of Intrepid’s main goals of the website redesign was creating a more user-friendly experience for visitors and for their team internally. So the first part of our development efforts was taking their site that was built in Kentico and converting it over to Drupal to result in pages and sections that were easy to build and edit by their marketing team. Then using the Tessitura API, we worked in React to build the interactive map and sort the data for a fully integrated purchasing flow, which includes account creation, guest ticket purchases, member ticket redemption, membership purchases and password resets.
Fully Integrated Purchase Flow
An integrated purchase flow was a critical missing piece of what Intrepid had with their old site. In collaboration with Tessitura, their online ticketing system, we carefully analyzed their back-end documentation and implemented it in our Drupal coding. The result is a range of options between rates and packages for a fully integrated checkout experience that turns guest satisfaction into more transactions.
A New Digital Experience for New Generations
From reorganizing content and integrating branding to building a seamless checkout experience, our team delivered a fully featured, responsive, and beautiful website thoughtfully designed to attract and engage users and boost sales. What’s more, is arming the client with the necessary tools to stay sufficient, scalable and ready for wherever their historic endeavors take them next.
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