Overview
Patriots Point & Naval Maritime Museum provides visitors with a journey to the past that is both educational and entertaining. Home to the USS Yorktown (WWII aircraft carrier), the USS Laffey (destroyer), the Vietnam Experience, and the Medal of Honor Museum, the nearly 1,000,000-square-foot campus has plenty to offer. However, their website wasn’t helping visitors easily access the experience, both in person and digitally. Patriots Point Naval & Maritime Museum engaged Interactive Knowledge to create an enhanced user experience that would help visitors purchase tickets easily while also preparing them for their visit to the museum. Beyond ticket sales, IK was tasked with helping the museum better connect with users by sharing stories of the men and women who served on these ships. The Interactive Knowledge team completed a full discovery process, identified and prioritized the project goals, developed a full content strategy and UX design, and implemented a new, engaging site in under one year.
The Goals
- Improve the online ticketing process and fully integrate it into the website experience
- Promote visitor experiences and activities to bolster ticket prices
- Provide visitors with easy-to-find information to help them plan their visit
- Assure that the site complies with current accessibility standards
- Update video, photography, graphics, and overall design to create an engaging visual experience
- Design features that tell the stories of sailors who served aboard the USS Yorktown and USS Laffey
- Connect the digital archives and collections with the site and use the content to share the human stories tied to the naval and aircraft collection
The IK Approach
After delivering a detailed discovery report, we worked with Patriots Point to identify content areas that needed to be improved, developed a strategy for organizing and presenting content, and built a robust site that supports our strategy through imagery, video, and a pleasing visual design. The site involved multiple third-party vendor integrations—a great opportunity for our team to lean into our IK values and show flexibility and innovation to solve problems.
Results
We delivered a polished website with an improved user journey from first click to ticket purchase, building anticipation for users’ visits using beautiful videos, images, and graphics.
Some of the site’s features include:
- Interactive maps that help users plan their visit or navigate the ship while on-site
- Improved ticketing process that promotes additional experiences
- Easy to navigate calendar and event filters, helping users to know what is available on the day they visit, or what events they can plan to attend
- Quick access to donation and membership pages for easy conversion
- Strong navigation tools that focus on tickets but allow users to explore additional information about the campus, collections, educational offerings, facility rentals, and other groups associated with the museum
- Magazine-style display that helps users explore the digital collections and connect to the human stories associated with the items
- Robust Drupal 10 CMS easily updated by the museum staff
- Fully responsive and mobile-friendly site
- Site compliant with WCAG 2.1 standards
- Language options available in English and Spanish