Endless journeys in the Dutch Royal Collections
Project details
Client
Koninklijke Verzamelingen
Project
Website redesign
Services
Concept design, UX design, Direction
Year
2023-2024
Credits
Making the plan
Located in the Royal Archive, on the compound of the Noordeinde Palace, the Dutch Royal Collections (Koninklijke Verzamelingen) are stored. It consists of more than 10.000+ historical objects and 4 kilometers of archived material.
It's maintained by the Dutch royal family with the aim of preserving Dutch cultural heritage and making it accessible to the public through exhibitions and research opportunities.
Making the plan
We kicked off the project by diving deep into the vision and initial briefing. To ensure we fully understood what was needed, we crafted a set of targeted questions and brought them to our client. This helped clarify any uncertainties and allowed us to map out the features and technical dependencies that would be essential to achieving our goals.
Once we had a solid grasp on the project’s scope, we circled back with the client to review everything together. With everyone on the same page, we moved on to drafting user stories and building a backlog. Prioritizing these stories with the client was the final step before we were ready to hit the ground running with our sprints. We were prepped and eager to get started!
Located in the Royal Archive, on the compound of the Noordeinde Palace, the Dutch Royal Collections (Koninklijke Verzamelingen) are stored. It consists of more than 10.000+ historical objects and 4 kilometers of archived material.
It's maintained by the Dutch royal family with the aim of preserving Dutch cultural heritage and making it accessible to the public through exhibitions and research opportunities.
Serendipitous discovery
I lead the conceptual phase in which we came up with the idea to connect all the different pieces of content through storytelling. The stories could by told by combining all ingredients: objects, archive pieces, people, locations and exhibitions. By linking them together users can keep on exploring the website and discover new things.
New ways of navigation
To make it easy for users to go on a journey we introduced a sidebar with all the content related to the page currently visited. Next to that we made visual inline text links to invite users to explore more. Furthermore, to allow users to not get lost and get back easily to where they came from, I designed a dynamic back button. This button would mimic the browser back button sending users back to the previous visited page. On most websites the back button goes to the parent page but this would be confusing for users as they travel across the different sections of the website.
The nitty gritty details
Although the new design focussed on making the website interesting for a bigger, general audience we didn't forget the researchers. In co-creation sessions that I facilitated we uncovered all the intricate details that we needed to know to design the object and archive detail pages.
A royal collection for everyone
Solution
Serendipitous discovery
I lead the conceptual phase in which we came up with the idea to connect all the different pieces of content through storytelling. The stories could by told by combining all ingredients: objects, archive pieces, people, locations and exhibitions. By linking them together users can keep on exploring the website and discover new things.
New ways of navigation
To make it easy for users to go on a journey we introduced a sidebar with all the content related to the page currently visited. Next to that we made visual inline text links to invite users to explore more. Furthermore, to allow users to not get lost and get back easily to where they came from, I designed a dynamic back button. This button would mimic the browser back button sending users back to the previous visited page. On most websites the back button goes to the parent page but this would be confusing for users as they travel across the different sections of the website.
The nitty gritty details
Although the new design focussed on making the website interesting for a bigger, general audience we didn't forget the researchers. In co-creation sessions that I facilitated we uncovered all the intricate details that we needed to know to design the object and archive detail pages.
