Tate Website Redesign
August - December 2016
In August 2016, I made the move from Melbourne to London. I was honoured to be hired on a contract basis by digital product agency Mentally Friendly, to lead the redesign of the Tate Gallery's website.
Tate is a family of four art galleries in London, Liverpool and Cornwall known as Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool and Tate St Ives. Its mission is to increase the public's enjoyment and understanding of British art from the 16th century to the present day and of international modern and contemporary art.
The Tate site is home to over 77,000 artworks and over 4,000 artists - a vast inventory, making for a sizeable job. For this reason, the site simply couldn't be rebuilt, and needed best-in-class UX and design amends to be recommended and designed by us and then implemented by the internal Tate development team.
The first pages to be designed as part of the rebuild were the highest traffic areas of the site - the artists and artwork listing pages.
A workshop to bring all departments together
In addition to the design of the site's most integral pages, I was also tasked with facilitating the conceptualisation, UX and design of a 'discovery tool' to help users discover more of the artists and artworks on the site.
With so many knowledgable stakeholders within the Tate team, it was essential that all ideas were heard, so with the help of the Mentally Friendly team, I planned and led a full day 'discovery workshop' for the Tate team. As part of this workshop, I taught the attendees techniques for rapid ideation, sketching and group voting to allow them to come up with a solution to the business problem and ensure all ideas were brought to the table. The day was a great success and helped lead us to a clear winning idea from what started as 20 sketches whilst ensuring the whole team felt heard.
The Discover tool
The resulting concept was a natural language form that would put together intriguing sentences based on the artwork's subject or artist. The user could click on each highlighted word in the sentence to discover a listing page based on that keyword, click the primary CTA to view the specific artwork the sentence referred to, or 'shuffle' to discover more.
