Coeli management system redesign

Redesign a software to manage museum's collections

CMS to deal with all the digitalizations in museums and galleries

Coeli is a small team of product owners, marketing and developers based in Barcelona building digital tools for collections ranging from art pieces, to documents, and various items.

Background

They wanted to do an analysis of the current status of the interfase, and improve the UX and UI in general. I had the good fortune to work in this project with my colleague Flor Iwan.

Manage art & other objects for museums

Spain museum experts from different ages

Incremental changes for established users

General info

Research and discovery

The research and discovery was divided in two steps: First, a series of workshops with stakeholders and developers, to understand what are the main cases of use and the capabilities of the product. Second, a set of interviews with the main type of users that the platform is directed to. With the results of this two steps we generated user journeys and framed the main problems of the users.

Interviews with users

We have three initial sessions with the main type of users of the platform: Two for big teams in museums and one for a medium size catalogue in a private collection. This sessions where super insightful for us, we learned a lot of the day-to-day of the users and also the other type of software they where using to accomplish their goals.

User journeys

With the results of the interviews and the information given by the product team, we created some user personas and user journeys to map the main interactions and detect the pain points and potential opportunities for improvements and also what parts of the system where working as expected and we must avoid to modify.

Wireframes

Create basic wireframes to discuss our findings with the development and product and understand the feasibility of the project.

Then test and iterate with users.

Design system

In collaboration with the development team, we created a UI library tailored to the front-end framework used by our developers. This library streamlines the design process, ensuring consistency and efficiency across projects. By aligning design elements with the Coeli team workflows, we helped the development team to be more agile while improving the user experience.

Small sample of the token library based on the framework used by the front-end team

UI first delivery

Through close collaboration with developers, stakeholders, and end-users, we successfully redesigned the main screens of Coeli. By gathering insights from all parties, we identified key pain points and opportunities for improvement.

Login page

Using the existing branding and the new UI we aim to introduce the users to a new interface that is both familiar and fresh.

Home page and main collection

This page was the more impacted by the re-design, we tried to make more visible the main interactions and hide the elements that weren’t so relevant.

Create new item

The creation of a new item in the collection is the more involved part of the journey, we added new features to ease this process.

Conclusions

The communication with the final user allow us to help the team to coordinate priorities and detect low hanging fruits in the UI. Also we managed to create documentation with the main user journey, this will certainly will help the product and tech team down the road.

Outcomes

  • We finalized the first iteration of improvements to the platform
  • Thanks to working hand and hand with the developers in the ideation process, the development was super fast

Opportunities & recommendations

  • We need to test the live version with users to see that everything is working as expected
  • We need to define better improvement metrics to measure the success of the project