The Western Cape Province Museums, Libraries, and Archives (MAL) seek
to transform their web portal into an engaging and interactive digital hub. The MAL hub will need to be
visually engaging, display relevant information, and pages that embody the digital MAL hub.
To do this, the Website would need to showcase museums, archives
and artifacts, and library resources. The client specified that there should be a game-ified or highly
interactive component. The web Hub would have to be accessible to members of the public in several
respects, such as literacy, internet access as well as technological literacy.
The Western Cape provincial Government's Museums, Archives and Libraries, while falling under one
purview. However, their web-presence, is either non-existant, or highly disconnected from one another,
without any connecting links, or any centralised landing page. This has resulted in fewer visits to the
institutions, as well as an effective loss of access to information to the average South African.
The goals of the project are to create a centralised 'Hub' space for the disparate content pages, that
allow for easy access to each content page, across literacy, technical literacy and age levels in South
Africa. The website would have to be accessible to users on mobile devices as well as users with poor
internet connections. The 'Hub' SPace would also require a 'game-ified' interactive compontent, that
would keep users engaged and increase visitation rates to the associated facilities
The project will attempt to achieve this aim by method of the following objectives: Create a simple,
image focused landing page, utilising content provided by the Western Cape Government, Create example
content pages for Museum, Archive, and Library spaces, and generate a prototype for presentation to the
clients.
In order to fulfill the requirements as stated above, project would consist of five interconnected
web-pages, that all match the client's corporate identity, as well as create a friendly, yet
professional tone of voice.
The first step in the project was generating a user persona,
for an end user of the web-site. This was done through research about typical users of museum and
library spaces,as well as research into the literacy and technological literacy rates in South Africa.
Then several rounds of iterative prototyping and design, until an overall look and feel had been decided
on.
The website was then prototyped on mobile and desktop, in order to generate a more finalised look across
a range of devices. The colours were chosen to have a good contrast and be legible, as well as to
conform with the client's corporate identity.
The next steps were to begin creating and collating content for the example pages, as well as
programming the final pages and the interactive components. This consisted of researching best practices
in web design and simple game design principles.
Following this, the final page was put together, and made responsive to device and screen size changes.
Finally presentation materials were created to then showcase to the clients for final approval and
feedback.
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