Revealing Hidden Content: How the V&A website has been transformed to help our visitors find what they want

Mark Hook, Victoria & Albert Museum, United Kingdom
http://www.vam.ac.uk

Demonstration: Demonstrations - Session 1

The Victoria and Albert Museum's website was relaunched in August 2004 with a brand new look and completely new structure. The main purpose of this was to make its diverse range of content much more accessible to all audiences. This demonstration will show how we tried to open up our structure and radically rethought our use of language and presentation to better enable users to find what they are looking for. We will demonstrate how user testing at the design stage led to better clarity of presentation and helped us to break away from the use of internally focussed terminology and groupings which had proven impenetrable to many. Supported by a complete change to the style of our homepage the new structure and fresh design have almost doubled the number of visits to the site and produced much more positive feedback.