Carnegie Website header

Carnegie Museum of Natural History Website

Team:
Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Deliverables:
Website user experience

Year:
2017

Carnegie Museum of Natural History located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is among the top natural history museums in the country. It generates new scientific knowledge, advances science literacy, and inspires visitors of all ages to become passionate about nature and world cultures.

The museum’s website was badly out of date. The marketing team conducted internal and external focus groups with staff members and visitors to research the issues. Three of the primary problems identified were:

  1. Inaccurate and poorly performing content

  2. Limited user experience, especially on mobile devices

  3. A lack of compliance with accessibility standards, making the website unusable for persons with disabilities

Carnegie website process
Carnegie Homepage Before

Before

Carnegie Homepage After

After

Carnegie website before and after mobile
Exhibition page design
Field trips page design
Research staff page
0%
Increase in organic traffic score
0%
Increase in average session duration
0%
Reduction in website load time

WCAG 2.0 AA Standards for Accessibility

The new site includes accessibility features like equivalent text descriptions for images, skip navigation links, and keyboard/tab access and meets WCAG 2.0 AA standards. Testing was done with a group of twelve users who require assistive technology to access the web. Of these participants, 100% agreed that the site was easy to read or hear and 100% agreed that the website was well organized.