The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum stands as one of Boston’s most distinctive cultural treasures. Founded by the visionary Isabella Stewart Gardner herself, the Museum offers a transportative experience that defies conventional art museum expectations. Yet for all its in-person magic, the digital experience had room to better serve the institution’s mission. 

The Museum needed a solution that would honor their unique brand identity while solving critical usability challenges that were hindering meaningful digital engagement.

The Museum faced a variety of digital barriers that were undermining their core mission. Since launching a redesign effort in 2017, their website struggled with fundamental usability issues that created friction at several touchpoints:

The Findability Crisis: Staff members regularly used Google to locate content on their own website. The people most familiar with the site struggled to navigate it efficiently, highlighting how challenging the experience must be for visitors. 

Accessibility Barriers: The website failed to meet current accessibility standards, with poor color contrast rendering content difficult to read for visitors with visual impairments. As an institution committed to welcoming all visitors, they have been spearheading important initiatives to review and remediate accessibility, including their digital platform.

Navigation Complexity: The previous design used internal logic that wasn’t intuitive to visitors, particularly those unfamiliar with the institution, treating many landing pages like a series of doors and frames. While visually striking, this approach created a maze-like experience that prioritized aesthetics over visitor needs.

Content Architecture Issues: Exhibition details, ticketing information, and visitor resources were scattered across the site without hierarchy or clear pathways between related content.

These challenges weren’t just inconveniences—they were preventing the Museum from achieving its core digital goals of inspiring visits, supporting trip planning, and fostering deeper engagement with their collection and history.

Rather than pursuing a complete rebuild that would disrupt operations and require extensive backend development, we opted for a strategic re-architecture. This approach allowed us to transform the user experience while preserving the visual identity and content management systems the Museum’s team relied on.

Our methodology centered on understanding both the institution’s unique character and their visitors’ diverse needs:

Discovery & Stakeholder Alignment

We began with comprehensive stakeholder workshops, bringing together team members from across the Museum to align on priorities and success metrics. By synthesizing member surveys, analytics data, and internal insights, we developed a clear picture of both current pain points and future opportunities.

User-Centered Design Strategy

We mapped core tasks to real visitor types by creating focused user journeys for Museum Members, purchasing a ticket, navigating the museum’s collection and information while visiting, and researching art online afterward. Our user journey mapping ensured every design decision served real visitor needs.

Information Architecture Transformation

We rebuilt the site’s navigation and menu system, creating intuitive pathways that support natural user behavior. TreeJack testing validated our approach, ensuring the new architecture would actually improve task completion rates.

Accessibility-First Enhancement

Newly designed components aligned with WCAG 2.2 AA standards, proving that accessibility and aesthetic excellence aren’t mutually exclusive. We demonstrated how inclusive design could enhance the Museum’s distinctive visual character.

“Gentle Elegance” Design Philosophy

Working closely with the Museum team, we developed a design approach that captured the institution’s intimate, sophisticated character through subtle details—lace patterns and mosaic elements that reference the collection and architecture without overwhelming the interface. This strategy allowed us to inject personality into the digital experience while maintaining focus on usability.

Enhanced Navigation Architecture: We introduced dropdown menus and logical content groupings that transformed how visitors move through the site. Museum websites often avoid complex navigation, but we proved that thoughtful hierarchy actually improves rather than complicates the user experience.

Reimagined Visit Page: This became the crown jewel of our transformation—a comprehensive resource that balances practical planning information with pathways to deeper content exploration. The page now prepares visitors for the Museum’s unique characteristics (awareness of the lack of labels, availability of audio guides and mobile device charging stations, etc.) while building excitement for the experience ahead.

Component System Redesign: Our new component library enables the Museum’s team to create engaging content layouts without sacrificing accessibility or performance standards.

Performance Optimization: Behind-the-scenes improvements ensure the site loads quickly and functions smoothly across all devices and connection speeds.

The transformed digital experience delivered immediate, measurable improvements across every key area of visitor engagement. Three weeks after launch, the data tells a compelling story of enhanced user behavior and meaningful interaction with the Museum’s digital presence.

Enhanced Homepage Engagement: The redesigned homepage achieved a 9.7% increase in views alongside a significant 15.6% increase in average engagement time, demonstrating that visitors are not only discovering the site more frequently but spending meaningful time exploring what it offers.

Dramatic Exhibition Discovery: The Exhibitions section experienced remarkable growth with a 179.7% increase in views and 22.9% higher engagement time. This transformation demonstrates how improved information architecture and content discoverability can dramatically expand visitor interest in the Museum’s programming.

Deeper Content Engagement: The Inside the Collection blog saw an 18.4% increase in views coupled with an impressive 61.7% increase in average engagement time. Visitors are not only finding this content more easily but engaging with it far more meaningfully, suggesting successful pathways between practical planning content and deeper cultural exploration.

Strengthened Community Connection: The Membership section achieved a 15.7% increase in views with steady engagement time growth of 2.5%, indicating improved pathways for visitors interested in developing ongoing relationships with the Museum.

These metrics validate our strategic approach of balancing usability improvements with content discoverability. The data shows visitors are finding information more efficiently while also discovering opportunities for deeper engagement with the Museum’s mission and offerings.

Isabella Stewart Gardner created something unprecedented: an intimate, personal art experience that defies conventional museum expectations. Every element was chosen and placed with intention, creating an environment where visitors don’t simply observe art—they step into a carefully curated world.

This uniqueness creates both opportunity and responsibility in the digital realm. The website serves as many visitors’ first encounter with the Museum’s distinctive character. When that initial experience is confusing or inaccessible, it undermines so much of what makes the Gardner special.

Our strategic approach recognized that preserving the Museum’s essence required more than maintaining visual elements — it demanded understanding what makes the institution extraordinary and translating those qualities into digital interactions. By balancing usability, accessibility, and aesthetic sophistication, we enhanced an online experience that genuinely reflects the Gardner’s spirit.

The transformation supports the Museum’s broader mission in measurable ways:

Visitor Empowerment: Clear, accessible information helps visitors plan with confidence and arrive prepared for the Gardner’s unique approach to art presentation.

Deeper Engagement: Improved content discoverability means the relationship with the Museum can extend beyond the physical visit through blog content and collection exploration.

Inclusive Access: Meeting accessibility standards ensures the Gardner’s digital presence welcomes all visitors, reflecting the institution’s commitment to openness and equity.

Operational Excellence: Streamlined content management empowers staff to focus on mission-critical work rather than wrestling with technical barriers.

Ultimately, this project demonstrates how thoughtful digital transformation can honor an institution’s distinctive character while removing barriers to meaningful engagement. We didn’t just improve a website, we helped the Gardner Museum extend its intimate, intentional spirit into the digital realm, ensuring that more people can connect with what makes this cultural treasure truly extraordinary. 

Visit California is a Destination Marketing Organization (DMO) with over 25 years of experience in promoting California as a premier travel destination. The organization, funded through a unique partnership between the state and the travel industry, operates with a substantial budget of over $185 million (2023). As the leader of California’s brand messaging, Visit California previously anchored its campaigns under the “Dream Big” brand positioning. However, following a significant shift in traveler motivations post-pandemic, Visit California recognized a growing desire for experiences that foster joy, connection, and adventure.

This insight led to the evolution of the brand into “The Ultimate Playground,” a strategic repositioning that highlights the state’s unparalleled diversity of geography, activities, and cultural experiences. 

The “Let’s Play” campaign leveraged a robust mix of television, out-of-home, digital, and social media activations to showcase California’s diverse offerings — from wine tasting and rock climbing to luxury hotel stays, food truck adventures, and outdoor music festivals. By highlighting the playful spirit inherent in every experience, the campaign aimed to deepen the audience’s emotional connection to the state, reinforcing California’s identity as The Ultimate Playground and setting the stage for sustained brand engagement.

The initial roll-out of a rebrand update is critical, and transitioning from “Dream Big” to “The Ultimate Playground” required careful internal alignment and thorough message testing. Oomph, alongside Visit California’s partner agencies, began collaborating on this effort about nine months before the campaign launch. During these early planning meetings, our team contributed key ideas and strategic approaches to help shape the campaign.

Our focus remained on the web user and their position in the customer journey. Previous campaigns had not fully optimized the user flow, so we saw this as an opportunity to reimagine the experience. With paid media driving traffic to the website, it was essential to provide visitors with clear actions once they arrived. The advertising had done its job by capturing attention and sparking interest. Now, our challenge was to build on that momentum, guiding users from interest to meaningful engagement and action.

An interactive Quiz 

The Ultimate Playground campaign needed to accomplish a few things:

Our teams settled on a quiz as a way to engage visitors and serve them personalized content. Based on initial research, we decided an image-based quiz would be the fastest and most fun way to answer questions and receive a set of recommendations. Choosing preferences from a set of images is a quick way to make progress tangible. We limited the questions to nine, and most visitors took two minutes to complete the quiz.

Play Styles

The eight Play Styles were based on personas researched and created by the National Institute for Play, headquartered in California. Content creators at Visit California crafted a series of TV spots with glimpses into different styles of play. Our Play Quiz would highlight which Play Style matched the participant’s preferences, and our results pages served relevant, curated content, a similar Celebrity personality, and even a secondary play style. 

Email collection allowed visitors to send their play style results to themselves and allowed opt-in to more personalized content. Our team worked quickly over three months to solidify the approach, choose the quiz method and weighting criteria of the questions, and design the eight play style pages, two landing pages, a homepage takeover, and supporting pages for the new campaign. 

Our approach to the campaign was to support the bottom of the funnel and give visitors coming from digital ads something useful. Given the wealth of content the Visit California website contains, these broad Play Style personas made visitors see themselves in California. It brought curated content to them and provided what we thought of as a personal homepage with relevant recommendations. 

“Let’s Play” was the first part of a years-long brand campaign. We are already working on the campaign for 2025 which we hope will be even more engaging than the first!

To ensure the new dementia care site was intuitive, structured, and easy to maintain, Oomph worked closely with UCSF to:

1. Build a Flexible and Organized Content System

With hundreds of resources ranging from clinical guides to local service listings, content needed to be structured for easy access. We:

2. Optimize Search and Resource Navigation

Given the depth of content, finding the right resources quickly was a priority. We:

3. Introduce Video and Multimedia Features

To make the site more engaging, UCSF wanted to integrate video content as a core educational tool. We:

A Smarter, More Accessible Dementia Care Resource

The new dementia care platform is a comprehensive digital tool designed to improve how caregivers and clinicians access critical information.

By focusing on content organization, searchability, and usability, Oomph delivered a digital hub that will support dementia care communities for years to come.

Leveraging our deep expertise in healthcare content strategy and digital engineering, Oomph worked closely with ONS to streamline content, improve search functionality, and enhance the overall user experience.

Creating a Flexible, Scalable Content System

ONS had a vast library of interconnected clinical, educational, and research materials but lacked an effective way to organize them. We:

Optimizing Interactive Oncology Tools

Two core resources—the Biomarker Database and Symptom Interventions tool—are essential to oncology nurses’ daily workflows. Oomph redesigned these tools to:

Implementing Smarter Search for Faster Access

Nurses often rely on quick search queries to find patient care guidance. To enhance search accuracy and speed, Oomph replaced ONS’ legacy Solr search with Algolia’s instant search technology, delivering:

Aligning Design With the ONS Brand Evolution

ONS had recently completed a rebrand, but its digital presence hadn’t fully evolved to match. Oomph helped translate the new brand identity into a cohesive web experience by:

A Unified, High-Impact Digital Resource

The new ons.org is a centralized, efficient, and scalable platform that makes it easier for oncology nurses, institutions, and administrators to access and manage critical healthcare resources.

For oncology nurses, this platform is more than just a website—it’s a trusted clinical resource that supports better patient care, continuing education, and professional growth.

We focused on eliminating friction and enhancing engagement through a user-first strategy, modern information architecture, and a flexible, scalable design system.

Understanding the Audience & Challenges

Our discovery process included stakeholder workshops, user journey mapping, and content analysis to identify key roadblocks. We uncovered:

By clearly defining what success looked like and identifying areas of improvement, we laid the foundation for a streamlined, student-centric digital experience.

Defining the Strategy & Roadmap

With a deep understanding of user needs, we developed a strategy focused on engagement, clarity, and accessibility.

This strategy ensured that KSC’s website would be functional, engaging, and built to support student recruitment.

Executing the Vision

To bring the strategy to life, we developed a modern design system with a flexible, component-driven architecture that simplifies content management and improves the user experience.

By creating a well-structured, intuitive content ecosystem, KSC now has a digital experience that is easy to manage and designed for long-term adaptability.

A Student-Centric Digital Experience

The new Keene State College website now provides:

A Digital Experience That Grows With Its Community

Keene State’s new site is more than just a redesign—it’s a long-term investment in student engagement, accessibility, and institutional identity. By focusing on audience needs, structured content, and a scalable design system, KSC now has a future-ready digital presence that enhances recruitment, supports students, and strengthens the college community.

Go Ask Alice! (GAA!) is a judgment-free, anonymous question-and-answer site. It is part of Alice! Health Promotion, a department of Columbia Health. Their content has always been reliable, accurate, and thoroughly researched by professionals — humans, not Artificial intelligence (AI)!  While organic search brings many different kinds of audiences across the globe to their answers, their primary audience is the college students of Columbia University. These digital natives need the content to speak their language and to look modern and relevant. Oomph leaned into the college-aged persona to create a user interface that was fun, unique, and approachable while acknowledging and respecting the gravity of the questions students ask. 

Empathize with both Visitors and Authors

We began by working to understand and empathize with their audience — which was easy. How many of us have gotten lost searching for answers to questions we might not ask our own close friends? Questions like, “Can I get Hepatitis A from eating raw seafood?”, “Do I have OCD?” or even “Why did my father abandon me?” Analytics supported how these types of questions were prevalent. They also showed that while many visitors found GAA! through search, those visitors found their answer and quickly left. While in some ways, this was positive — someone had a question and found a satisfactory answer — visitors missed lots of other answers to questions they might have.

For the Go Ask Alice! author team, technical issues often arose that were rooted in an overly complex content architecture and workflows that required lengthy workarounds. A complicated review and approval process and ineffective spam filters made combing through user submissions time-consuming. The longer it takes the team to create new answers, the less students will want to send GAA! their questions.

Our shared goals were to:

Modernization & Trust-building 

Most Gen-Z students and younger generations won’t trust a site that isn’t designed well for a mobile screen. Our design process emphasized the small screen experience, keeping filters, sharing, citations, and recirculation in logical places. The Columbia Health brand is also a powerful lever for establishing trust with a young audience, but we were careful not to let it overpower GAA!’s own authentic brand.

Supporting Trust with New Features

Enhancement ideas started to surface during Discovery and continued throughout the process from both teams. Some of our favorites include:

Increased User Engagement & Accessibility

Accessibility & Safety with a Quick Exit Button

Go Ask Alice! has many sensitive questions: questions about sexual abuse, suicide, drug use, and topics generally that you may not want someone else to see on your phone. We introduced a Quick Exit feature on each page of the site. When visitors click the button, a new tab is quickly opened, and the site’s browsing history is removed from their device. While this is not a well-known action in the general population, many in unsafe situations know how they work and what “Exit Site” means. 

Oomph has written an in-depth article about the quick exit button and has released a Quick Exit Drupal Module to help other teams implement this feature. 

Encouraging Question Browsing over Asking New Questions

It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the major workflows we redesigned was asking a question in the first place. The GAA! team has compiled thousands of great answers over the years and frequently updates old answers with new content to keep them current with changes in medical approaches. The small but mighty team didn’t want to answer the same questions over and over again by referring new askers to pre-published answers. 

Our solution emphasized search and intentionally made access to the Question form difficult. Visitors are encouraged to search for answers to previously posted questions first. Quite often, they will discover an answer to their questions (and maybe some helpful answers to questions they did not expect). Only if they have searched first will they encounter the “Can’t find your question” call to action, which leads them through the steps of asking a new question. 

The new site feels like a new beginning for the GAA! team. While the site has only recently launched, we look forward to seeing how it impacts key metrics like time on site and return visits. In the meantime, we’re also excited to see how the newly revamped admin experience helps the GAA! content team serve their audience even better than before. 

When faced with a sensitive question about mental, nutritional, emotional, or sexual health, college students can continue to Go Ask Alice!

Custom Tools Leveraging Site Factory

A key goal was being able to quickly provision sites to new or existing agencies. Using Drupal 9 (and updated to Drupal 10) and Acquia’s Site Factory, we gave the state the ability to stand up a new site in just minutes. Batch commands create the site and add it to necessary syndication services; authors can then log in and start creating their own content.

We also created a set of custom tools for the state agencies, to facilitate content migration and distribution. An asynchronous hub-and-spoke syndication system allows sites to share content in a hierarchical manner (from parent to child sites), while a migration helper scrapes existing sites to ensure content is properly migrated from a database source.

Introducing Quahog: A RI.gov Design System

For organizations needing agility and efficiency, composable technology makes it easier to quickly adapt digital platforms as needs and conditions change. We focused on building a comprehensive, component-based visual design system using a strategy of common typography, predefined color themes and built-in user preferences to reinforce accessibility and inclusivity.

The Purpose of the Design System

The new, bespoke design system had to support four key factors: accessibility, user preferences, variation within a family of themes, and speedy performance.

Efficient and Effective Paths to Communication

The first sites to launch on the new system, including covid.ri.gov, went live four and a half months after the first line of code was written. A total of 15 new sites were launched within just 8 months, all showing a 3-4x improvement in speed and performance compared with previous versions.

Every site now meets accessibility guidelines when authors adhere to training and best practices, with Lighthouse accessibility and best practice scores consistently above 95%. This means the content is available to a larger, more diverse audience. In addition, a WAF/CDN provider increases content delivery speeds and prevents downtime or slowdowns due to attacks or event-driven traffic spikes.

State agencies have been universally pleased with the new system, especially because it provides authors with an improved framework for content creation. By working with a finite set of tested design patterns, authors can visualize, preview, and deploy timely and consistent content more efficiently and effectively.

The Virtual Lab School (VLS) supports military educators with training and enrichment around educational practices from birth through age 12. Their curriculum was developed by a partnership between Ohio State University and the U.S. Department of Defense to assist direct-care providers, curriculum specialists, management personnel, and home-based care providers. Because of the distributed nature of educators around the world, courses and certifications are offered virtually through the VLS website.

The existing online learning platform had a deep level of complexity under the surface. For a student educator taking a certification course, the site tracks progress through the curriculum. For training leaders, they need to see how their students are progressing, assign additional coursework, or assist a student educator through a particular certification.

Learning platforms in general are complex, and this one is no different. Add to this an intertwined set of military-style administration privileges and it produces a complex tree of layers and permutations.

The focus of the platform assessment phase was to catalog features of the largely undocumented legacy system, uncover complexity that could be simplified, and most importantly identify opportunities for efficiencies.

When building for speed and scalability, fully leveraging Drupal’s advanced caching system is a major way to support those goals. The system design leverages query- and render-caching to support a high level of performance while also supporting personalization to an individual level. This is accomplished with computed fields and auto-placeholdering utilizing lazy builder.

The result is an application that is quicker to load, more secure, and able to support hundreds more concurrent users.

When building for speed and scalability, fully leveraging Drupal’s advanced caching system is a major way to support those goals. The system design leverages query- and render-caching to support a high level of performance while also supporting personalization to an individual level. This is accomplished with computed fields and auto-placeholdering utilizing lazy builder.

The result is an application that is quicker to load, more secure, and able to support hundreds more concurrent users.

Oomph partnered with NBC Sports to develop the Olympic Zone, a secure, Drupal-powered editorial platform that served as the content submission and management hub for all NBC affiliates covering the Games.

Streamlining Content Submission & Editorial Review

NBC’s local affiliates needed a way to quickly submit articles, athlete spotlights, polls, media galleries, and ad campaigns for review. Oomph built:

Centralizing Olympic Media & Resources

To support affiliates with high-quality content, the Olympic Zone became a one-stop destination for NBC-provided assets, including:

Enhancing Collaboration & Affiliate Profiles

To foster communication between NBC’s editorial team and affiliates, the platform allowed:

The Results: A Powerful Platform for Olympic Storytelling

The Olympic Zone platform successfully empowered NBC affiliates to share high-quality, localized Olympic coverage at scale, ensuring a consistent and efficient editorial workflow throughout the Games.

By delivering a powerful, intuitive editorial platform, Oomph helped NBC Sports amplify local storytelling, ensuring every market had access to the best Olympic coverage.