In 2020 I had the chance to work for the prestigious Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, UK. The project “Most sacred things” was centered around a digitized archive of 18th century hand-written letters by poet William Hayley. This dataset of correspondences constitute a unique source through which to map an extensive network of influential writers, artists and their circles in 18th century England.
The challenge
The research question was: How we can best organise and display the digital archive to highlight connections between people, places and the production of literature and visual art?
In addition to the information architecture and UX challenge, we were tasked to come up with a high-fidelity graphic design and developing the code for the interactive UI components.
What I did
I teamed up with my collaborator and fellow creative technologist Philo van Kemenade to develop a new UX concept and a library of UI components.
I developed 2 alternative UX/UI concepts (we named them “Garden stroll” and “Hayley’s inbox”), both including responsive solutions for mobile and desktop screens. After working out the wireframes and presenting them to the client, we finetuned the navigational logic and high-level interaction pattern.
Then we developed the graphic design for all components and templates inside Figma.
The last step was the development of the actual UI components. We used the JS framework Vue.js and Storybook for documenting and testing the components and turned it into a “living styleguide”.
We worked closely with Fitzwilliam’s in-house developers to ensure the components consumed accurate data structures.
We used the video platform “Loom” to present our designs to the client and ask for asynchronous design feedback.
Image above: Sketches from the early ideation phase; visualizing different UX concepts, user interface ideas and layouts
Technicalities
Figma for UI and screen design
Vue.js for developing interactive components
Storybook for developing our custom UI component library and “living styleguide”
Links
- A publication about the project: https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/most-sacred-things-a-museum-of-relationships/
- Code on Github: https://github.com/phivk/fitz-hayley
The project was supported by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant and a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant.
