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Sending your friends that collection of sushi restaurants in NYC just got much easier.
Roles
Product Design, Visual Design, Prototyping, Interaction Design, User Flows, Illustrations
Timeline
June — August 2023
Team
Judy and Eliot (co-founders)
Emily, Caroline, and Mina (engineers)
Tools
Figma, Figjam
Overview
tk
HIGHLIGHTS
A digital web application that shares the treasures of the New York Times' history with remote employees.
CONTEXT
There's an in-house "Museum at the Times" nestled in a corner of the 15th floor of NYT's headquarters.
Artifacts range from the paper’s very first print edition to personal belongings of journalists living through recent global events, such as the onset of COVID-19 and the Jan. 6th Insurrection.
DISCOVERY
People want to see the museum made available to everyone, everywhere.
Our team began our project with a guided tour of the museum, led by retired journalist and museum curator, David W. Dunlap. We gathered the following from his tour:
Honest Representation of History
Between jokes and skits, David made sure his narrative of the Times’ acknowledged some harsh truths about events from the collection.
Chronological Order
David guides the audience from the beginning of the Times through the two cases that showcases most recent notable moments.
Stories in the Present
The Museum is a living piece of history. Throughout the years, new exhibits are curated from the stories told today.
Clearly, there's a lot of valuable information that employees and journalism fans alike can gain from the museum. Experiencing it is something you wouldn't want to miss.
These sentiments apply to the public too. When a NYTimes article introduced the opening of this museum in 2021, many subscribers were eager to see it open to the public, or at least have access to a virtual tour.
PROBLEM
The current museum isn’t even accessible to remote employees.
Right now, the only way for a remote user to view the Museum is via video chat with someone who is physically there. We tested this “virtual experience” by calling a remote employee to show her the museum, then gathered feedback and accompanying conclusions.
We discovered that for a remote user, the priorities are:
NEEDS
How might we design a digital experience for remote NYT employees to explore the Times Museum, that allows them to autonomously dive into artifacts that illustrate the key moments and evolution of our brand?
With our insights, we conducted whiteboarding sessions to identify the most relevant features.
The initial emphasis fell on offering flexibility while still giving users access to curated narratives. Our proposal? Guided tours.
DESIGN ITERATIONS
Regaining focus: conquering the Artifact Page
There wouldn’t be a tour to give if there were not fascinating artifacts to talk about. As such, I worked with Frannie, another designer, to create a page for individual objects.
Iterations
We wanted a lot of features but could not do it all. After some prioritization, we decided to focus on interactions that spotlight the object and its materiality—such as the shuffling of newspapers or printed documents.
Concept 1: Isometric Layouts
Concept 2: Carousels and Cards
Concept 3: Point-and-Click
The artifact page should be more than an encyclopedia entry. How can we balance unique narratives and consistency in design?
How can the remote experience mirror the physical space?
We extensively explored how to digitally represent the physical museum experience. Our final decision was respecting the authenticity of the physical space and duplicating the immersive on-site experience. We created this panorama background by stitching museum pictures together, which gives users a 360 perspective.