The Natural History Museum

DiSSCo UK Blueprint design, making the case for a UK natural science collections national digitisation programme.
2022  •   2 Month Project  •   Promotional (Public) Website  •  UX&UI
Final project outcome.
Brief
The Natural History Museum (NHM) needed supporting material for their funding pitch to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which would take the form of a website and booklet. The NHM is part of a consortium applying for the funding, the name of this consortium is DiSSCO UK.
The website will act as an attractive and easy to understand summary of the DiSSCo UK business plan. The format will be text light, focusing on key messages and leading with images and infographics where possible. The site will be responsive to both mobile, tablet and desktop.
Team & Responsibilities
I was the project lead and solely responsible for the design, development and handover for this project. The project was overseen by the Creative Director.
Content
The content for the website was provided by DiSSCo (the client). I structured the information architecture, navigation and page layout to provide the best user experience for the content provided, this included the following:
  • The breadth and scale of UK natural science collections and their current levels of digitisation / digital readiness
  • How natural science collections benefit society
  • How collections are being made digital
  • The national infrastructure requirements to facilitate UK wide digitisation
  • How DiSSCo UK will be organised, governed and financed (high level descriptions) & creation of links to external dashboards and training resources
Project background
DiSSCo History
The UK’s museums and botanic gardens hold exceptional and diverse natural science collections, estimated at over 130 million objects. Digitisation is the process of converting physical information into a digital form.
DiSSCo (Distributed System of Scientific Collections) UK is a new consortium composed of many of the UK’s natural science collection institutes including: the NHM and the Royal Botanic Gardens. There aim is to digitise, share and develop these collections for the benefit of science and society.
Information Architecture
Mid Fidelity Wireframes
UI Inspiration & Supporting Booklet Design
Final UI | Mobile
Click images to enlarge
Final UI | Desktop
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Style Guide / Component Library
Portfolio Assets
Business Impacts/Results
The website created for this project helped The Natural History Museum to recently benefit from an additional £20 million of Government funding for the Unlocked programme, on top of the £182m announced at Spring Budget 2020. This will support a Government-wide priority to increase investment in UK science, research and development, and facilitates the Museum’s largest collections move for over 140years.
Link to report
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