Making History with an Interactive Digital Experience
Client
WA State Historical SocietyAbout
The Washington State Historical Society collects, preserves and shares Washington State’s history through events, exhibits, education, resources and artifact collections. SiteCrafting worked with the Society to craft a digital experience that was tailored to each of its audiences, developed a flexible and responsive website, and integrated site search with collections search to present users with robust results that are integrated and interactive.
Search Results Not Found
The Society’s website was limited in its features and flexibility. The website was also home to enormous amounts of content and was a resource for a variety of organizations, departments and individuals across the state of Washington. We wanted to help the Society better understand it’s users and organize content so people could connect with the information they were looking for quickly and easily.
Prioritizing User Experience
Our User Experience team hosted a goal-setting workshop with the Society at the start of the project. Workshop insights informed persona development and prioritization, and also resulted in a proposed information architecture.
Content Strategy
We worked alongside the Society to develop a content road map and recommendations to help the organization’s team audit, update and edit information in a focused, efficient way. The goal was to elevate the user experience that delivered content such as the Suffrage Centennial events, programs and artifacts with impact.
Search Update
Developers used our product Sitka Insights to create a streamlined search experience that displays results from the Society website as well as its collections. Previously the search functions were disconnected and inconsistent, and the collections search relied on a database that worked double-time to respond to requests and manage updates. If the database went down, so did the collections search. Our team developed a replica database that is hosted and secured separately and updated daily. Now, if the Society’s database crashes, users can still search collections.
