4Culture Heritage

Research and layout for new resources and offerings for professionals in the heritage and cultural field

Overview

4Culture is a government body in King County, Washington, that provides funding and support for the cultural work that makes King County vibrant. Their Heritage department helps communities recognize, preserve, and explore our shared heritage.

After a successful collaboration with their Public Art team, the Heritage team reached out for help on how they could present commonly-asked information and resources. Over the course of a few months, I explored how we could present resources to the varied groups of people who visit (or may visit) the 4Culture Heritage webpages, in ways that are easy to find and digest. This was a small project, but one that provided lots of insights!

Research

4Culture already had an idea of the different types of people that were or would need to access their resources: 

• Heritage professionals: seasoned professionals working in the cultural and heritage space, such as museum curators or long-term volunteers and nonprofit directors

• Emerging Museum Professionals (EMPs): Individuals early in their career in the museum and cultural fields

• Applicants: Individuals applying for 4Culture funding, who are trying to understand if their work is considered “heritage”

• Inquirers: Individuals who work outside the field but have questions about heritage work, such as inquiries about photographs, local history, and more

Over a series of phone interviews, I learned more about the experiences and perspectives of individuals from each group. As I mapped out their experiences, I began to see not four groupings, but three groupings: 

• Emerging Museum Professionals (EMPs): Similar to the initial grouping, this group of individuals is new in the field and discovering the joys and challenges of working in this space

• Seasoned Heritage Professional: These individuals might be applicants, museum workers, professional volunteers, and more, but they all have expertise in a particular cultural realm

• Curious Cultural Doer & Relationship Builder: Photographers, journalists, entrepreneurs, and other movers and shakers who are building new heritage programs and protecting and strengthening existing ones

Planning

During the interview process, I asked participants about their work and how 4Culture can provide resources to aid them, as well as their thoughts on the existing resources. This feedback led to ideas regarding how to group the resources, as well as what resources people wanted to see. Some of the most commonly requested resources across personas were resources about:

• Equity, including resources for differently-abled individuals

• Finding additional sources of funding (including seeing what other grants 4Culture has made)

• Finding spaces for events, programs, curation, etc.

• Job seeking

• Finding volunteers

Design

Insights from talking with users led me to suggest some adjustments to the Heritage department’s landing page. From there, we would introduce an entirely new Resources page that not only offered resources 4Culture had planned to share, but new resources that were requested by users during our interviews.

Heritage Landing Page Wireframe OPTIONS

New Resources Page Wireframe OPTIONS

Results and Learning

This project fascinated me because the issue of equity was front and center in many of my interviews. Many of the Emerging Museum Professionals (EMPs) and young heritage professionals discussed the challenges of discussing equity and engaging other members of the community on this topic. 

“There was lots of stress in my board when we completed a survey that included questions about age, sexuality, race, etc. People were like ‘Oh man, we’re all just white people, will they stop funding us?’ And with the concern comes defensiveness, and that shuts down meaningful, hard conversations.”

The Heritage team has since made some adjustments to their website, including launching a new Field Resources page modeled off of the third wireframe above.