Peabody Essex Museum

The Challenge

Peabody Essex Museum is a world-renowned art museum located in Salem, Massachusetts. For more than 220 years, PEM has been dedicated to collecting, preserving, and showcasing compelling artwork from throughout history and around the world. The museum offers a constantly changing array of immersive exhibits and performances—but they were concerned that their website was leaving visitors flat. 

While the exhibit pages were highly informative, they suspected that the navigation, registration, and shopping experience that surrounded it all left much to be desired. They also worried that it was difficult to distinguish what was part of the museum’s permanent collection and what was on special exhibit, making it hard to answer the simple question, “What am I going to see?”

ZeroDegrees has long been a patron and supporter of the museum (in fact they were our neighbor, just down the street from our offices). So, we were honored when PEM asked us to use more scientific diagnostics to assess their digital experience, and then explore UX strategies to make it more logical, visceral, and immersive—from the moment visitors began planning their trip to all the ways they might commemorate the time they spent there.

Our Approach

From our initial discussions with PEM, it became clear that they needed a deeper and broader sense of their visitors. What inspires a museum goer to take the trip? Is the experience a solo endeavor or is it communal? How does digital influence their journey and elevate the richness of their visit? 

Through a series of in-depth, 1:1 interviews, we uncovered distinct personas ranging from those who view art as central to their identity to casual hobbyists. Some visitors might visit once in a while as a way to “try something different” while others never missed an inspiring exhibit or chance to learn. Then, we established short and long-term goals along their journey to help each persona plan their visit more efficiently to discover more and feel less overwhelmed while at PEM.

Next, we dug into the digital experience through an extensive heuristic review of the site. When we evaluated the current site against the persona journeys, we found that, even though PEM’s site aesthetic was clean and sophisticated, it was overwhelmed with promotions—and user paths all too often lead to dead ends. Our goal was to help streamline the flow and information design to improve the exploration and ticket buying journey. 

Through a series of iterative sketches, we helped the PEM team re-image the site experience. The primary navigation would be combined into one view so users could immediately distinguish special exhibits from the permanent ones. Page templates were reorganized to provide better cadence and clearer calls to action. We completely redesigned the event section to help visitors find and plan ahead for future events. Plus, we found ways to make the site more useful and less “dead-endy” so that it was easier to plan a visit, understand how you’d spend your time there—and clearly see the benefits (and savings) of becoming a member of the museum.

The Results

Armed with our new personas and sketches, PEM immediately overhauled their navigation system. Then they took the templates and began building the next new iteration of the site (which recently launched to rave reviews). Behind the scenes, the PEM team is using their new personas to help drive strategic decisions at every level of planning to help them be more user centric every step of the way.