Case study: National Portrait Gallery
As the National Portrait Gallery prepared for its major reopening in 2023, we provided vital insights into online audience behaviour and website usability.
The National Portrait Gallery looks after the world’s greatest collection of portraits. The collection spans six centuries, from Shakespeare to Stormzy, and Darwin to Elton John.
In 2021, the Gallery embarked on a monumental project to transform itself on and offline. While its doors were shut from 2021 to 2023, it wanted to carry on showcasing its collections through its digital channels.
That made it vital to properly understand its website audiences: how the site was used, by whom, and where it could be improved.
We set out to answer the Gallery’s questions about its audiences, and to provide insights for a website redesign that would serve as the digital doorway to its collections. Our analysis had three parts:
I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to others looking to better understand the strengths and weaknesses of their website.
Following our report, the National Portrait Gallery redesigned its website, launching the new version in February 2023.
The Gallery took our feedback on board and concentrated on decluttering the homepage and other key content pages, making the navigation neater and clearer, improving the search function, and using clearer language to present information.
Main navigation
Search
The collection on the homepage
The team were fantastic, from coming up with a methodology that really worked for our needs, to feeding back the findings in a really clear yet comprehensive way.
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