Strategic Refresh of Rockhall.com

Long Live Rock n’ Roll

We overhauled RockHall.com into a wwworthy home to showcase what visitors can expect from the real Hall of Fame. The user experience and visual design are built around the museum’s floors, taking inspiration from the Rock Hall’s unparalleled archive of instruments, posters and other music memorabilia. The events and exhibits pages now enable visitors to plan tours around their favorite artists. Drawing upon the Rock Hall’s exclusive media, we also edited and enhanced 300+ biographies to highlight the accolades of every inductee.

My Role

I was the senior UX researcher and strategist on the project. My primary role was to lead the requirements gathering for both the business and end-user. I led both stakeholder interviews and end-user interviews that were on-site and captured business goals for the dotcom refresh as well as key user pain points, needs, and tasks with museum attendees.

Besides gathering, defining, and prioritizing requirements for design and engineering teams, I also conducted a detailed competitive analysis with museums and a comparative study based on competing points of interest in Cleveland. Insights were used by both design and marketing to inform messaging and creative differentiation within the category.

After presenting to Rockhall executives our content, identity, and messaging strategies, we were given immediate go-ahead to start detailed design and engineering work. I off-boarded to a mid-level UX strategist who were fully dedicated to the completion of the project while I went to another digital product strategy ask.

Key Findings + Recommendations

Non-Profit Status Requires a Specific Type of Mindset

In order to maintain its 501(c)(3) non-profit status, the function of Rockhall’s web experience had to meet Level AA accessibility standards, a standard with the biggest and most common barriers for disabled users. Everything from interaction, to content & design was tested thoroughly in order to adhere to a standard that was “perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust”. Research and testing is the easiest and cheapest way to avoid costly development while also keeping users at the forefront of our design decisions. I traveled to Cleveland three times that year to hold interviews & conduct task analyses with museum goers that represented a spectrum of ableist abilities and age.

The ticket office eventually knew me by name.

Personalization is Important with Content & Event Heavy Experiences

With an annual induction ceremony, countless public programs and weekly events, and 100s of hours of digital viewing & reading content, Rockhall.com for less of a better word is overflowing with info. To empower and not overwhelm audiences seeking information we needed to define a content strategy that was scalable and delightful. The dotcom’s core idea is to build tailored routes for users explore, discover, learn, and act. What was seen as a stream of digital consciousness is now an experience rooted in people’s tastes, intrigue, and nostalgia through highly curated touch-points sprinkled throughout the Dotcom. Translating that strategy into action, we created a bespoke “Your Tour” experience, designed to deepen people’s relationship with music with curated tours similar to Blockbuster employees picking out their Monthly film faves.

Balancing Business Sales with Music Stories

The dotcom has two strategic functions: stories and sales. The latter’s business goal is driving museum and event ticket sales, however from our audit, we discovered several third party ecomm integrations caused fragmented experience in every purchasing flow. That meant buying tickets to the museum, purchasing memberships, even a t-shirt at the estore all had challenges. We focused on building an integrated team of UX, design, & tech, while strategy acted as oversight - in order to enable consistency and seamlessness through the various parts of Rockhall’s digital ecosystem.

But the story is not over - we also looked holistically at how the museum acquired new customers, and provided a channel strategy and design for their paid media plan.