Chicago History Museum
Objective
In the Spring of 2022, executives at The Chicago History Museum came to us at Clique Studios to modernize their site’s user experience to drive advocacy, memberships, and visits in this period coming out of the pandemic.
Like much of our work, we would need to design conversion-focused experiences that balance brand expression with business goals.
What did their site visitors think?
After meeting with stakeholders, I created a quick survey to gather attitudinal feedback from site visitors and received responses from roughly a quarter of the museum’s members.
Takeaways:
Visual Experience: Users want a more dynamic, immersive visual language that better reflects Chicago’s rich history.
Introduce richer, more expressive visuals aligned with Chicago’s cultural heritage.
Accessibility: Color and contrast issues present a meaningful barrier, particularly for loyal, older users with vision limitations.
Improve color contrast and visual clarity across the site to meet accessibility standards.
Customer Recognition: Paying members expect personalization and clearer signals that their loyalty is recognized.
Add personalized content, status indicators, or tailored experiences for paying members.
Orientation & Flow: Subdomains and external links cause disorientation, reducing users’ sense of control and continuity.
Use consistent breadcrumbs and smarter internal linking to reduce disorientation.
Surface prominent “Buy Tickets” and “Become a Member” CTAs on the homepage and key pages.
Conversion Friction: Critical actions, especially ticket purchasing, are not intuitive for a significant portion of users.
Redesign the ticketing flow with stronger information hierarchy, reduced text, and clearer next steps.
What are their competitors doing?
While waiting a week for survey results to come in, I ran a competitive analysis to create a shared understanding of their landscape and establish a creative vision for our team.
Use the homepage as a storytelling moment: Design it to immediately convey why the Chicago History Museum matters, not just what it offers.
Blend past and present: Pair contemporary assets with archival imagery to anchor modern narratives in Chicago’s living history.
Express the brand through design details: Draw subtle shapes and lines inspired from the logo to reinforce brand identity without overpowering content.
Create visual depth: Introduce texture within secondary colors and layer elements to reflect both the richness of the collection and the city’s layered history.
Bring the experience to life: Use thoughtful parallax motion to add movement and showcase the breadth of exhibitions, inviting exploration and discovery.
How can we streamline their ticketing process?
To increase revenue, the Chicago History Museum needed to reduce friction in its ticketing flow. Although transactions were managed through Altru, the experience introduced unnecessary complexity that risked drop-off.
I mapped and compared ticket-purchasing flows across the Museum’s site and peer institutions using Altru, identifying key friction points and opportunities to streamline the path to purchase and improve conversion.
How did we do?
From our launch in August 2022 to July 2023 compared to the same period from 2021 to 2022:
14.06% increase in returning site visitors
10.68% increase in mobile visitors
Our redesign not only improved & streamlined user experience but drove higher engagement and delivered tangible business value.
The rest is history!
