Natural History Museum
Front-end Development
This role had many different requirements, ranging from front-end development, prototyping, creating and maintaining design systems and pattern libraries, running A/B tests, user research, interviewing and mentoring.
Details
| Client | Natural History Museum |
|---|---|
| Year | 2019 |
| Duration | 3+ years |
| Tools & Tech | HTML, CSS, Sass, JS, Aria, SVG, Git, Optimize, InVision, PhotoShop |
| Output | Front-end code, A/B tests, Prototypes, Accessibility |
| URL | nhm.ac.uk |
Summary
Joining the Natural History Museum was a dream come true. Having spent years wandering those historic halls as a kid, to finally be in that space and contributing to its purpose was almost unbelievable. It will likely remain the highlight of my career in terms of ‘best place to work’: once can’t fail to be awed each time you enter that place and walk past a 150 million year old stegosaurus.
I worked in the digital team and in the sub-product ‘Visit’, a small team tasked with helping visitors plan their trip to the museum and then make the most of it once there. The Visit team are responsible for the part of the website with the same name, including the events calendar.
I worked on a number of different projects, many of which were still in the prototype stage by the time I left and sadly have not seen the light of day. This was mostly because of Covid and the various changes to our focus that were required during long periods of lockdown. Obviously with the museum closed during those times, the remit of the Visit team changed drastically and much of the work for the developers became quite fragmented.
Contributions
- Prototype for a new interactive SVG map to replace the static image that confused most visitors. This was a really fun piece of work where I was able to use my interest and experience with web graphics to great effect.
- Prototype for an animated landing page for the Fantastic Beasts exhibition which ultimately was unused due to licensing issues with the imagery.
- Testing a paper prototype with museum visitors of a game/app to learn more about how smartphones are made using minerals from around the world.
- Experiments to improve the performance of the Events Calendar, which was very slow due to loading the entire list into the browser in one server request.
- Designing and rolling out a new layout system for most pages of the site using CSS Grid, to replace the existing layout solution from Bootstrap.
- Establishing a new capability for individual pages of the site to be ‘themed’ with changes to colours and imagery.
- Experimenting with a workflow approach to the ongoing removal of Bootstrap from the frontend to be replaced by our own frontend code.
- Attending user-testing sessions for accessibility and implementing recommendations.
- Updating gallery information kiosks, deploying new versions of apps to USB fobs and working with the exhibitions teams to install the changes.
- Improvements to the functionality of the Visit landing page.
- Improvements to myriad components.