Overview

Catch Carbon is powered by Rare, a global conservation organization with 40 years of experience driving behavior change across 60 countries. Their mission depends on mobilizing individuals and communities to take actions that benefit both people and the planet.

To expand the voluntary carbon credit market, Rare needed a digital platform that could explain carbon offsets clearly, build trust with everyday users, and convert awareness into action. Nothing quite like it existed. Oomph partnered with Rare across two phases: first to bring the concept to market quickly, then to build the infrastructure to sustain and scale it.

The Challenge

The voluntary carbon market had a visibility problem. Carbon offsets represent a powerful tool for individual climate action, but public awareness remained low. Most people didn’t understand what carbon offsets were, why they mattered, or how to purchase them confidently.

Rare needed more than a website. They needed a digital experience system that could:

And they needed it fast, with the flexibility to learn and adjust as real user behavior emerged.

The Approach

Phase 1: Design and Launch

Oomph led discovery, experience design, and development for Catch Carbon’s initial launch, bringing the platform to market in under three months.

We started with a cohort analysis of more than 20 platforms, from other emerging carbon marketplaces to crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Kiva, to understand the landscape and identify what was missing. The research confirmed there were no established best practices; Catch Carbon would need to set its own.

From there, we focused on connection and credibility. User journey mapping helped us anticipate visitor mindsets at every stage: curious on arrival, inspired while browsing, confident at checkout. Our approach included synthesizing project data to showcase aggregate impact, simplifying navigation, standardizing project descriptions, and introducing “Collections” that bundled multiple projects to help users maximize their contribution.

We led Rare through a design language workshop, used style tiles to align on aesthetics quickly, and refined full page designs in real time as we tested the internal API. Seven weeks after kickoff, Catch Carbon launched publicly.

Phase 2: Platform Rebuild

With the concept validated, Rare needed infrastructure to match their ambitions. Oomph designed and built a modern, flexible platform, leading both design and engineering.

We recommended Contentful as the content foundation and React for the front-end experience. This headless architecture separated content management from presentation, giving Rare’s team the ability to update messaging, launch campaign pages, and refine user flows without developer dependencies.

We built a modular design system that balanced clarity, trust, and accessibility across every component, from educational explainers to conversion flows. On the engineering side, we extended Rare’s existing API to support the new platform, working alongside their internal team to ensure seamless data flow and operational continuity.

Throughout, we treated the platform as a system to operate, not a project to complete.

What This Made Possible

Two things made this work: Oomph’s ability to balance speed with rigor, and our commitment to operating as a true partner with Rare. In Phase 1, we moved from vision to launch in weeks without sacrificing design quality. In Phase 2, we built on what had been learned rather than starting over, preserving continuity for users while dramatically improving the underlying infrastructure.

Oomph is personally invested in the kind of environmental work Rare does, which made this collaboration something more than a project.

The Result

Catch Carbon launched v1.0 to the public in seven weeks, marking a milestone for the voluntary carbon credit market and democratizing access for everyday consumers. The platform has since been rebuilt on a modern headless architecture that gives Rare the operational flexibility to test, iterate, and scale on their own terms, supported by a design system that maintains quality and consistency as the audience grows.

Why This Matters

Most organizations in the climate and nonprofit space face the same trade-off: build something fast and limited, or invest in systems that take too long and cost too much. Catch Carbon is proof that speed and sustainability aren’t mutually exclusive. They just require the right partner and the right approach.

By treating digital infrastructure as a system to operate rather than a project to deliver, Rare gained the foundation to test, learn, and scale. And by staying in the partnership across both phases, Oomph helped ensure that what was built in Phase 1 wasn’t discarded. It was built on.

It’s nice to have a partnership [with Oomph] where you guys are so honest, straightforward, hardworking, and thoughtful.

— Catch Carbon

Overview

Bradley Hospital is the nation’s first hospital dedicated exclusively to children’s mental health and behavioral health care, and a teaching hospital for Brown University. Families travel from across the country seeking specialized care. Providers turn to Bradley for clinical expertise, education, and research. The organization’s national reputation is well established.

Previously, Bradley’s website lived inside the broader Brown University Health system site, a shared platform built to serve an entire health system with a wide range of services and audiences. As Bradley’s clinical profile and reach expanded, the opportunity emerged to give the organization its own dedicated digital home: one structured specifically around the people who turn to Bradley, the content they need, and the urgency they often feel when they arrive.

That’s the work Oomph was brought in to do.

The Challenge

Elevating Bradley’s digital presence to match the weight of its clinical reputation meant addressing three interconnected opportunities.

First, consolidating Bradley’s content into a unified, findable home. Some Bradley content lived in its own section of the Brown University Health site, while some was spread throughout the broader system. Key educational resources were either static PDFs or hosted on external platforms with no connection to Bradley’s web presence. Users who found one piece of content had no clear path to related resources. Bringing everything together under a single, purpose-built destination would make that content far more discoverable to those in need.

Second, building a structure around Bradley’s specific audiences. Families searching for care for a child in crisis, providers evaluating referral options, and clinicians seeking professional development have distinct needs and varying levels of urgency. Building a dedicated site allowed us to create an Information Architecture that centered around those three groups: their priorities, their task flows, and the moments when they most need clear answers.

Third, establishing a dedicated search and AEO/GEO presence. A standalone domain with structured, indexable content is the foundation for organic search visibility. It’s also increasingly central to how AI-powered tools and engines surface authoritative health information. Bradley is among the most authoritative institutions in the country on pediatric mental health. A dedicated digital presence would enable that authority to translate directly into discoverability for both traditional search and AI-driven discovery.

The Approach

Oomph partnered with Bradley Hospital leadership, clinicians, and internal stakeholders to understand each audience’s needs before making any structural decisions. Those conversations shaped content priorities, navigation architecture, and the task flows that matter most: finding care, accessing crisis support, making a referral, and registering for a course.

A dedicated platform within a shared infrastructure

The site was built in Drupal using the Domain Access suite of modules. This architecture gave Bradley a fully independent domain and brand while keeping it connected to the Brown University Health ecosystem. Bradley-specific content serves exclusively on BradleyHospital.org. Shared resources adapt dynamically to the appropriate domain and theme. Canonical URL strategies prevent SEO conflicts across the two properties. Bradley’s team gained full control of their digital presence without duplicating the operational overhead of maintaining a separate platform.

Three new content types that replaced fragmentation

One of the most significant structural decisions was building purpose-built content types for Conditions, Courses, and Podcasts, formats designed specifically for how Bradley’s audiences search for and engage with information. A long-standing mental health education publication that had existed only as a PDF became structured, accessible web pages. Courses previously hosted on external platforms moved directly into the site, improving visibility, searchability, and registration flow. Podcasts became indexable content connected to related topics and programs. Taxonomy-driven connections across all three types help users navigate related content naturally, rather than hitting a dead end.

Navigation built for action

A custom “I Want To” quick-action menu surfaces the highest-priority tasks across all user types: finding care, accessing crisis support, exploring programs, and making a referral. Families in stressful moments can reach critical information within one or two clicks. Key conversion pathways, including crisis help, philanthropic giving, career exploration, and educational resources, were elevated in the global navigation to reduce friction wherever a user enters the site.

Design that earns trust without creating distance

Bradley’s visual identity needed to feel distinct from Brown University Health while remaining credible within that system. The design extends the Brown Health palette, then refines it: rounded shapes, thick borders, muted tones, and soft animations that create a sense of warmth and approachability without sacrificing authority. As one key stakeholder described it, the site “speaks ‘professional’ while also having a little lighter touch to it.” Accessibility and mobile responsiveness were integrated throughout, with WCAG best practices and screen reader compatibility front of mind throughout the design process rather than as afterthoughts.

What This Made Possible

Since launching in November 2025, BradleyHospital.org has attracted more than 95,000 new users, with nearly 89,000 sessions driven by organic search, the direct result of the dedicated domain and SEO-structured content. The site’s dedicated domain also helps ensure that Bradley content is correctly attributed and surfaced by AI-powered search tools and generative engines. Clear brand identity, structured content, and a standalone domain are exactly the signals those systems use to identify authoritative sources. For a site that previously had no independent search presence, that volume of organic discovery represents a fundamental shift in how families and providers find Bradley online.

Nearly half of all visitors arrive on mobile (48.1%), which validates both the design investment and a harder truth: families searching for pediatric mental health resources aren’t always doing so from a desk. They’re doing it from a parking lot, a waiting room, or a kitchen table at night. The mobile experience was built for that reality.

Key program and condition pages are generating engagement time that indicates genuine research, not quick bounces. Pages covering intensive OCD and anxiety programs, outpatient services, and levels of care are averaging 50 to 83 seconds of engagement time, a range consistent with focused, task-oriented research behavior. Users spend real time with the content that matters to them before taking action, rather than scanning and bouncing. The Courses page averages 65 seconds. 

The returning user base of 13,000 is meaningful in context. Families researching care for a child often return to a site multiple times before taking action. That return behavior signals that the site is functioning as a trusted resource, not just a one-time destination.

Bradley’s team can now manage, update, and promote their content independently, without navigating the constraints of a shared health system platform. The structured content model makes it faster to add new conditions, publish new courses, and surface new resources without relying on outside support for routine updates.

The result

BradleyHospital.org is a purpose-built digital system that reflects the organization’s national authority in pediatric mental health while meeting the practical, urgent needs of the families and providers it serves. The independent domain, structured content architecture, and accessible design give Bradley both the visibility and the operational foundation to grow its digital presence on its own terms.

The site launched in November 2025 with a user testing initiative now underway to inform the next phase of optimization, an approach that reflects Bradley’s commitment to continuous improvement rather than a one-time launch. Design refinements and accessibility enhancements are being worked into the roadmap as the organization gathers real-world feedback from the community it serves.

Why This Matters

Healthcare organizations known for clinical excellence often find it difficult to showcase their unique strengths when operating within the digital ecosystem of a larger health system. The gap creates real costs: families can’t find care, providers can’t make informed referrals, and educational resources reach a fraction of the audience they should. Closing that gap requires more than a redesign. It requires a system that’s structured to perform, built to be maintained, and designed around the people who need it most.

The Business Context

CarGurus operates one of the largest online automotive marketplaces in the U.S. Its revenue model depends on dealer subscriptions. Dealers pay for access to shopper data, market intelligence, product tools, and business support. When that relationship is mediated by digital, the quality of the digital experience is not a design question. It is a retention question.

By 2019, the infrastructure supporting that relationship had become a strategic liability.

The Problem: Digital Debt at Scale

CarGurus’ dealer-facing web presence had grown organically into a collection of disconnected properties: multiple WordPress sites, a gated resource center, a product microsite, and a dealer dashboard. Each operated independently, with different workflows, separate analytics, and no shared content standards.

The consequences were structural, not merely cosmetic.

For internal teams: The B2B marketing team could not publish or update content without engineering support. Campaign velocity, product launches, and content strategy were bottlenecked by a dependency that had nothing to do with marketing capability. Without centralized reporting, leadership had no way to understand what was working or where dealers were dropping off.

For dealers: Research and interviews surfaced a consistent pattern. There was no obvious place to log in, product information and help content scattered across destinations, and shopper data siloed away from the resources that gave it context. The experience communicated the opposite of CarGurus’ intent. Dealers found fragmentation where they expected authority. Pre-consolidation data made the cost of that fragmentation concrete. The Dealer Resource Center carried a bounce rate of 61.57%, the Insights pages topped 80%, and the bulk of visitors spent fewer than 10 seconds on the site. Nearly 15% of dealers reported struggling to find information, with the disjointed experience cited as the primary reason. 

For compliance: Accessibility gaps across the WordPress properties introduced regulatory risk and excluded users relying on assistive technology, a segment of the dealer population that was simply invisible.

The problem was not any single site. It was the absence of a system.

The Diagnosis

Most agencies, presented with this problem, would have proposed a website redesign. Oomph diagnosed something different. CarGurus did not have a website problem, they had an operating model problem that manifested through websites.

The fragmentation was a symptom of three root causes:

  1. No content governance model. Without shared standards, each property developed its own editorial process, its own taxonomy, its own way of doing things. Content proliferated without coherence.
  2. No editorial independence. The marketing team’s dependency on engineering for routine publishing created a structural bottleneck that compounded over time. Every campaign, every update, every product launch queued behind engineering capacity.
  3. No shared measurement. Without centralized analytics, CarGurus could not connect dealer behavior across properties, could not identify friction points in the engagement journey, and could not make evidence-based decisions about where to invest.

Fixing any one of these without the others would have reproduced the same problem on a new platform.

The Solution: A Dealer Engagement System

Oomph began with structured discovery across sales, support, UX, and marketing using stakeholder interviews, a full content audit,  heatmap analysis, and a card sort exercise to understand how dealers actually navigate and categorize content. The critical finding was that dealers organized information around their workflows and tasks, not around CarGurus’ internal team structures. The existing architecture reflected the org chart. The new one needed to reflect the dealer. Dealer research also surfaced where content investment would matter most. 38.78% of dealers were very interested in digital marketing best practices, and 36.12% in automotive marketing best practices, two content categories that had been scattered or buried across the fragmented properties.

From that research, Oomph designed and built three interconnected capabilities.

A Unified Content Platform

Three separate sites, the Dealer Resource Center, the Dealer Account Request page, and the product microsite at products.cargurus.com, were consolidated into a single governed destination. The Contentful-based content portal consolidated Articles, Events, Products, Authors, and reusable Design Components into a single governed destination, with localization for the Canadian market. The content model was documented and governed, giving the marketing team full editorial control without engineering dependency.

Centralized Measurement

One destination meant one analytics framework. For the first time, CarGurus could track dealer engagement across the entire content ecosystem, not property by property, but as a coherent journey. Internal teams could direct every channel to the same URL, building familiarity and reinforcing the hub over time.

Systematic Accessibility Remediation

Accessibility work ran in two phases, starting with the existing WordPress properties (addressing contrast failures, empty labels, and keyboard navigation gaps), then post-launch across three Contentful-based sites targeting WCAG 2.1 compliance. Remediations included fixing keyboard navigation and adding tab focus rings across dropdown menus, correcting color contrast ratios to meet the WCAG 4.5:1 standard in headers, forms, and FAQ blocks, adding alt text to logos and informational icons, and converting static chart images into accessible HTML formats. This was not a one-time fix but a repeatable compliance process designed to scale with the platform.

What Changed

Operational velocity: The marketing team gained the ability to publish, update, and govern content independently, removing the bottleneck that had constrained their ability to execute for years.

Dealer experience: Three sites became one. Dealers gained a single, consistent destination for products, services, research, and account access. The experience shifted from fragmented and frustrating to coherent and navigable. Where pre-consolidation data showed bounce rates above 61% and the majority of visitors spending fewer than 10 seconds on site, the unified hub gave CarGurus the structural foundation to actually retain and re-engage that audience.

Strategic visibility: Centralized analytics replaced fragmented multi-site tracking, creating a shared foundation for understanding dealer behavior and making evidence-based decisions about content investment, product positioning, and engagement optimization.

Market reach: Accessibility remediation across five properties extended the platform to dealers using assistive technology, a population that had been excluded by the previous architecture.

The Strategic Takeaway

Complex B2B organizations accumulate digital debt one property at a time. By the time the cost becomes visible, it has already slowed marketing, obscured what matters, and turned internal fragmentation into a customer-facing problem.

CarGurus’ situation is common. What made the engagement different was the diagnosis. The dealer experience needed to be treated as an integrated system rather than a collection of sites to be redesigned. The distinction matters. A site redesign solves today’s problem. A system creates the infrastructure to solve tomorrow’s.

Oomph delivered the architecture, governance model, and editorial capability for CarGurus to keep improving dealer engagement over time, not as a one-time project, but as an ongoing organizational capability.

Ready to turn your digital fragmentation into a system? Let’s talk about what’s possible for your organization.

THE CHALLENGE

The Challenge

Fidelity Investments manages one of the most extensive content ecosystems in financial services, producing a constant stream of insights, trend analyses, and investment strategies. However, its design team faced a critical challenge — their design system felt restrictive rather than empowering.

While Fidelity’s internal team was updating brand standards, they struggled to apply them strategically within their digital experience. The design system supported incremental changes but lacked the flexibility to evolve with new ways of presenting content. Designers felt stuck in familiar patterns, limiting opportunities to rethink layouts, improve content discovery, and enhance engagement.

To break free from these constraints, Fidelity brought in Oomph to infuse fresh thinking, introduce new editorial layout strategies, and expand the capabilities of their design system.

OUR APPROACH

Oomph worked inside Fidelity’s existing design system, bringing an outside perspective to challenge old assumptions and push the boundaries of their brand standards.

Reimagining Editorial Storytelling

With Fidelity generating massive amounts of financial content, our team explored new ways to organize and present information. We conducted a cohort analysis of leading editorial experiences across industries, studying how different platforms arranged related content, structured topic-based storytelling, and guided users through complex financial narratives.

We then worked within Fidelity’s Figma files, prototyping new layout variations that:

  • Allowed for dynamic grouping of content by topic, trend, or investor interest.
  • Introduced larger, more structured content modules to replace scattered individual components.
  • Created scalable patterns that could adapt to different content types and investment themes.

Expanding the Design System Beyond Incremental Updates

While Fidelity’s internal team was busy refining brand alignment, we helped them move beyond small tweaks to explore new possibilities. Our role was to:

  • Push the boundaries of what was possible within their existing system.
  • Experiment with layouts that weren’t explicitly outlined in the brand standards.
  • Provide fresh external perspectives on how the brand could evolve digitally.

Collaboration & Seamless Handoff

We worked side by side with Fidelity’s internal team, ensuring every new layout and component fit within their development and governance structure. While Oomph focused on strategy and design, Fidelity’s team took the lead on integrating new components into their system and coding them into production.

Our handoff process included:

  • Detailed design annotations and functionality breakdowns.
  • Guidance on flexibility—such as how components could adapt to different use cases.
  • Clear expectations for future scalability and content governance.

By the end of the engagement, Fidelity had not only expanded their design system but also re-energized their creative thinking.

THE RESULTS

A More Flexible, Scalable Design System

Oomph helped Fidelity’s design team break free from rigid design patterns and accelerate innovation by delivering:

  • A reimagined editorial content strategy that improves engagement and storytelling.
  • Expanded design system components that allow for more dynamic content grouping.
  • A faster, more creative design workflow that helps Fidelity scale design updates with confidence.

By combining fresh creativity with structured execution, Fidelity was able to move forward with clarity, confidence, and a more powerful digital experience.

Helping Enterprises Scale Design Without Sacrificing Innovation

For large enterprises, design systems should accelerate progress—not slow it down. If your team is struggling with applying brand standards, creating scalable content models, or evolving your digital experience, let’s talk.

THE BRIEF

Never Stopping, Always Evolving

Leica Geosystems was founded on cutting-edge technology and continues to push the envelope with their revolutionary products. Leica Geosystems was founded by Heinrich Wild and made its first rangefinder in 1921. Fast forward to the 21st century, and Leica Geosystems is the leading manufacturer of precision laser technology used for measurements in architecture, construction, historic preservation, and DIY home remodeling projects.

Oomph and Leica collaborated on an initial project in 2014 and have completed multiple projects since. We transitioned the site into a brand new codebase with Drupal 8. With this conversion, Oomph smoothed out the Leica team’s pain points related to a multisite architecture. We created a tightly integrated single site that can still serve multiple countries, languages, and currencies.

THE CHALLENGE

Feeling the Pain-points with Multisite

Leica’s e-commerce store is active in multiple countries and languages. Managing content in a Drupal multisite environment meant managing multiple sites. Product, content, and price changes were difficult. It was Oomph’s challenge to make content and product management easier for the Leica team as well as support the ability to create new country sites on demand. Leica’s new e-commerce site needed to support:

MULTIPLE COUNTRIES AND A GLOBAL OPTION

SIX LANGUAGES

MANY 3RD-PARTY INTEGRATIONS

The pain points of the previous Multisite architecture were that each country was a silo:

  • No Single Sign On (SSO): Multiple admin log-ins to remember
  • Repetitive updates: Running Drupal’s update script on every site and testing was a lengthy process
  • Multiple stores: Multiple product lists, product features, and prices
  • Multiple sites to translate: each site was sent individually to be translated into one language

THE APPROACH

Creating a Singularity with Drupal 8, Domain Access, & Drupal Commerce

A move to Drupal 8 in combination with some smart choices in module support and customization simplified many aspects of the Leica team’s workflow, including:

  • Configuration management: Drupal 8’s introduction of configuration management in core means that point-and-click admin configuration can get exported from one environment and imported into another, syncing multiple environments and saving configuration in our code repository
  • One Database to Rule Them All: Admins have a single site to log into and do their work, and developers have one site to update, patch, and configure
  • One Commerce Install, Multiple stores: There is one Drupal Commerce 2.x install with multiple stores with one set of products. Each product has the ability to be assigned to multiple stores, and price lists per country control product pricing
  • One Page in Multiple Countries and Multiple Languages: The new single site model gives a piece of content one place to live, while authors can control which countries the content is available and the same content is translated into all the languages available once.
  • Future proof: With a smooth upgrade path into Drupal 9 in 2020, the Drupal 8 site gives Leica more longevity in the Drupal ecosystem

LEARN VS. SHOP

Supporting Visitor Intention with Two Different Modes

While the technical challenges were being worked out, the user experience and design had to reflect a cutting-edge company. With the launch of their revolutionary product, the BLK 360, in 2018, Leica positioned itself as the Apple of the geospatial measurement community — sleek, cool, cutting-edge and easy to use. While many companies want to look as good as Apple, few of them actually have the content and product to back it up.

The navigation for the site went through many rounds of feedback and testing before deciding on something radically simple — Learn or Shop. A customer on the website is either in an exploratory state of mind — browsing, comparing, reviewing pricing and specifications — or they are ready to buy. We made it very clear which part of the website was for which.

This allowed us to talk directly to the customer in two very different ways. On the Learn side, the pages educate and convince. They give the customer information about the product, reviews, articles, sample data files, and the like. The content is big, sleek, and leverages video and other embedded content, like VR, to educate.

On the Shop side the pages are unapologetically transactional. Give the visitor the right information to support a purchase, clearly deliver specs and options like software and warranties, without any marketing. We could assume the customer was here to purchase, not to be convinced, so the page content could concentrate on order completion. The entire checkout process was simplified as much as possible to reduce friction. Buying habits and patterns of their user base over the past few site iterations were studied to inform our choices about where to simplify and where to offer options.

THE RESULTS

More Nimble Together

The willingness of the Drupal community to support the needs of this project cannot be overlooked, either. Oomph has been able to leverage our team’s commitment to open source contributions to get other developers to add features to the modules they support. Without the give and take of the community and our commitment to give back, many modifications and customizations for this project would have been much more difficult. The team at Centarro, maintainers of the Commerce module, were fantastic to work with and we thank them.

We look forward to continuing to support Leica Geosystems and their product line worldwide. With a smooth upgrade path to Drupal 9 in 2020, the site is ready for the next big upgrade.

Museum websites have a unique duality. Unlike many other digital platforms, their primary goal is to encourage visitors to come in person. Their website may feature engaging articles or archives, cool virtual experiences, or highlight important research, but the physical space remains the heart of the museum, home to priceless collections and host to educational tours and programs. While the digital experience is still an essential one, the main objective of most museums is to welcome people through their doors. 

That is why the Visit section of a museum website is extra important. Visitors are looking for a single page that clearly outlines everything they need to know: admission prices and hours, what they can and can’t bring, accommodations for nursing mothers or individuals with disabilities, and so much more. Then again, different people need to know different information, so how do you keep everything together without it ballooning out of control? Despite its importance, many museum websites miss the opportunity to provide clear, concise, and accessible visit information in one central place.

A Survey of Website Visit Page Trends for Museums 

As part of a recent engagement with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, we conducted a cohort analysis of other leading museum and cultural organization websites. The study focused on key elements of museum digital platforms including menu design, navigation, and the Prepare for your Visit page. We noticed a theme that several Visit pages on museum websites felt like long, endless scrolls. They’re often filled with lots of information, but a lack of structure or thoughtful design makes them difficult to quickly parse. Through this exercise of finding what is and isn’t working well and questioning why, we walked away with a strong sense of what makes a successful Visit page. 

Answer Visitors’ Top Questions

Who, what, where, when, how. When thinking about what information should be contained on the Visit page, these timeless questions are a strategic starting point. Though simple, they are the questions visitors will ask themselves before they arrive at the museum. These questions can take many forms, but for the Visit page, we’re prioritizing logistics:

If you are writing the content for this page, start by answering these key questions. 

You may have your content set, but you also need to think about how it is prioritized through strategic page design. You should make sure that the most important information (usually hours and admission prices) is at the top of the page and always visible. Don’t hide this information in accordions. And even if your admission is always free, point that out. Visitors want to have that information before they visit your museum, so make sure it is clearly stated. After all, free or reduced pricing is often an enticing reason for many to come!

Despite what you may think, duplicating some key content in different locations across your website can be helpful, as long as it doesn’t get confusing. Just because you have the hours on the homepage, doesn’t mean you should skip it on the Visit page. Presenting the information in different formats can also be helpful. For example, MoMA’s visitor guide provides a contained experience which includes a lot of content that can be found elsewhere on the site, but organized for a particular need (someone coming to the museum now).

Strike the Balance between Enough and Too Much with Accordions

Nearly every Visit page we studied used accordions. When you’re looking at a long list of content, the option of tucking away big chunks of it into a collapsible block sounds pretty appealing. That said, there are ways to do it well and plenty of ways it can go wrong.

Whenever you use an accordion, you’re asking users to click or tap to see more. While requiring an action like this can be a nice way to keep visitors engaged, whatever they see before interacting needs to accurately represent what’s inside. Let’s say a user wants to know whether they can carry a backpack around the museum. A generic heading — like “Guidelines” — doesn’t speak to its contents and the user could easily overlook it. Accordions that are organized well and labeled clearly — more like ”What You Can Bring in the Gallery” — can improve content organization and reduce cognitive load.

Also take care to make sure that the accordions are built in a way that everyone can use them. Test them with a screen reader and navigate through with only your keyboard to make sure they are meeting accessibility standards.

Our recommendation: use accordions, but strategically. Don’t have more than 7 or 8 and never add essential information there that visitors would be looking for at a quick glance. 

Guidelines & Policies

One large category that sometimes stumps museum stakeholders is where to put all the guidelines and policies that they often need to state, sometimes even for legal protections. Oftentimes these get lumped into a large accordion or series of accordions on the Visit page, without the key policies pulled out and clearly stated for visitors looking for quick guidance on whether strollers are allowed in the galleries or whether they can take photos with their new fancy camera. 

Particularly when you have an extensive list of guidelines, a successful approach can be linking to a larger guidelines and policies page with the information organized by clear headings and categories (which is also good for SEO/GEO), as seen on The Frick’s website. Just remember our earlier point about duplicate content: For essential guidelines, such as bags and security policies, consider also including this information on the main Visit page.

Help Visitors Plan Their Day

Planning your Visit is a big topic and depending on your museum’s particular offerings, might encompass a lot. Preparing ahead can include everything from directions and parking, what’s on view, amenities (dining, shopping), types of tours offered and at what times, etc. The goal for this content is to make it easy for visitors on the day of their visit, both logistically and emotionally. At the end of the day, you want visitors to get the most out of their time at the museum. Assess what is considered essential information that should be included on the main Visit page, but also what might warrant getting its own subpage. This is where in-page linking can be your best friend. 

Prioritize an Easy Mobile Experience 

Visitors often state that they want to “disconnect” while at a museum. They might be happy to pull out their phone for a photo, but otherwise want to spend their time and energy on the physical space around them. We truly love that for them, but also know that the website can, at times, meaningfully enhance the visitor experience. When thinking about what types of content should be considered from a mobile-first perspective, these come to mind:

Ultimately, any content that is meant to be accessed while at the museum — member login and event schedule, for example — needs to be optimized for mobile. It’s especially important for this content to be easy to use and navigable on a small screen. We don’t want visitors to get lost in their phones or frustrated and ultimately give up. It needs to be intuitive to be a smooth piece of the whole experience.

Building a Successful Visit Page for Museums

Similar to building a successful navigation for a museum website, the first task of any organization looking to refresh their Visit page is to put yourself in the shoes of your visitors. Come up with a few key user journeys for various audiences. What would a family with small children need to know before coming to the museum? How about a person who requires a wheelchair or someone with low vision? What information would a student be searching the Visit page for? 

Beyond walking through the experience first-hand yourself, it helps to get an outside perspective. If you have the means to talk to visitors while they’re on-site, that can lead to some fascinating insights on their in-gallery experience. However, know that you’ll most likely encounter a positive bias in their responses. Not only are they enjoying a day at the museum, but it can be tough to give critical feedback to someone standing right in front of them. 

To counter that bias, gather feedback from additional sources: pop-up or email surveys, controlled usability testing, and website analytics. All of that data together can help give you the building blocks to ensure your visit page strikes the balance between being engaging and informative. By prioritizing clarity, accessibility, and thoughtful design, museums can ensure that visitors arrive knowledgeably at ease and excited to explore. 

A well-crafted Visit page is more than just a logistics hub, it’s the digital admissions desk of your museum.

When done right, it reduces friction, answers essential questions, and sets the stage for a memorable in-person experience. Ultimately, the Visit page isn’t just about driving attendance, it’s about shaping the visitor’s journey from the very first click to the moment they step through your doors.

Learn more about building a successful Visit page in a Case Study of our 2025 Re-Architecture project for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

By Rachel Heidenry & Rachel Hart

Museum websites are beautifully complex. As the digital counterpart to a physical space, they serve many essential functions. They must reflect the museum’s mission and values, while guiding users clearly to key areas of information. Museums with collections often need dedicated sections for research and archives; zoos may focus on telling the stories of their animals; and contemporary art institutions sometimes even use their sites as platforms for artists to showcase new work. At the same time, nearly all museum websites must serve practical needs like selling tickets or memberships, promoting events or fundraisers, and providing essential visitor information, like hours and directions.

Managing that much critical and varied information is a challenge for any website, which is why strong information architecture (IA) is essential. A successful navigation should be intuitive and accessible, with clear labels and well-organized categories.

Mobile-responsiveness is also crucial, especially for visitors who need quick access to find information, like admission prices or the current exhibitions, or who want to purchase tickets on the go.

For cultural organizations, a strong menu and navigation system is arguably the most important indicator of a successful website. 

A Survey of Website Navigation Trends for Art Museums 

While not all cultural organizations prioritize aesthetics, art museums inherently do. As institutions dedicated to the presentation of art, they think critically about how visual design shapes their brand identity. In some cases, aesthetics can overshadow usability, resulting in beautiful or cutting-edge websites that are ultimately difficult for both internal staff members and external visitors to navigate. 

As part of a recent engagement with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, we conducted a cohort analysis of other leading museum websites. The study focused on key elements of art museum digital platforms including menu design, navigation, content organization, and user flows. One striking insight was that many art museum websites avoid dropdown menus, instead favoring a simple list of four or five top-level categories. These are often labeled with opaque or “insider” terms, raising questions like: What does “Programs” signify? Does “Art” lead to the permanent collection or temporary exhibitions? Does the general population know the difference? And where in the world is the museum’s blog? 

Let’s take a look at the building blocks of a site’s navigation and what we learned from reviewing a cohort of cultural institution websites.

Utility Navigation

The utility navigation should help visitors quickly access essential information. As the name suggests, the utility navigation traditionally contains tools and actions (like login, search, and language select) that help visitors use the website. You’ll typically see it as a secondary list of items above the main menu, often in a smaller font. 

When deciding what to include in it, consider your primary visitors’ goals: What do they need to know or do on your website? Museums often use the utility navigation to drive high-value actions like purchasing tickets or memberships. Our analysis also showed that museums with online shops frequently included links to the store or member login portals when relevant. In general, it’s best practice to limit the utility navigation to 2-4 key items, not including search.

The Dropdown or Mega Menu

Museums have a lot of content. And the larger the institution, the more content its website undoubtedly has to provide visitors. Our analysis showed that institutions that embrace the dropdown menu are overall easier to navigate and more often mobile-friendly. The bottom line: you don’t want visitors to your website to have to go down rabbit holes to find essential information.

Categories & Language

A navigation menu requires words (obviously). These are among the first words anyone sees when they land on your website. Thus they set the tone and expectation for what kind of museum you are, while also telling the story of what someone can do both on-site and online. Making sure the words that comprise the navigation are distinctive, accessible, and concise is key.

Hamburger Menu

To keep the main navigation simple and clean, some museums, like The Barnes Foundation, opt to put additional links behind a hamburger menu, even at desktop widths. In this way, less significant information does not busy up the navigation, but visitors can still intuitively click through to find other key subpages. If you do this, be sure to still repeat the top level menu items, as this pop-out navigation will become your mobile view.

Conclusion: Building a Successful Navigation for Museums

If you are a cultural institution that is starting to rethink your website navigation, the first step is to put yourself in the shoes of your visitor. It’s critical to put aside internal org charts and take a user-centered design approach. Come up with a few key user journeys for various audiences. How would a first-time visitor purchase a ticket? How would a repeat visitor find more information about a particular work of art they loved? And then navigate your site as your user would. What are the pain points? What works well? What makes absolutely no sense at all? 

Once you’ve done that, be sure to take a step back from your website to see what types of content you have and the common ways they might intersect. This is important for establishing the key categories of your site, as well as its subcategories. You’ll often be surprised at the connections you can make and the overlaps in content that can be streamlined together. 

From there, you have the building blocks to start conceptualizing your new navigation, one that is usable, clear, and beautifully intuitive. Learn more about building a successful navigation in a Case Study of our 2025 Re-Architecture project for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Key Outcomes

Within three weeks of launch, the redesigned digital experience system demonstrated measurable improvements across every key visitor behavior: 

Homepage engagement time

+ 15.6 %

Exhibition page views

+ 179.7 %

“Inside the Collection” engagement time

+ 61.7 %

Beyond the metrics, the new system fundamentally changed how the Gardner operates online:

  • Operational efficiency: Staff can now find and update content without external search tools, reducing technical dependencies and accelerating publication cycles
  • Foundation for iteration: Clear analytics, accessible components, and logical content structure enable ongoing testing and optimization based on visitor behavior
  • Inclusive access: WCAG 2.2 AA compliance extended reach to visitors with disabilities while improving usability for everyone
  • Strategic content pathways: Improved architecture creates discovery opportunities, extending engagement beyond transactional tasks to collection content, exhibitions, and membership

The Organization

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is one of Boston’s most distinctive cultural institutions. Founded by Isabella Stewart Gardner herself, the Museum offers an intimate, unconventional art experience—no labels, personal curation, and a transportive environment that defies typical museum expectations.

For an institution built on intentionality and access, digital experience shapes whether people visit, how they prepare, and whether they return. When the Museum’s website became a barrier rather than a bridge, they needed a partner who could modernize their digital experience system without erasing what makes the Gardner extraordinary.

The Challenge

The Gardner’s digital presence had become operationally unsustainable and strategically misaligned:

  • Internal navigation failures: Staff routinely used Google to find content on their own website, signaling fundamental architecture problems
  • Accessibility gaps: The site failed WCAG 2.2 AA standards, excluding visitors with disabilities and contradicting the Museum’s commitment to inclusive access
  • Scattered information architecture: Exhibition details, ticketing, and visitor resources lacked clear relationships or pathways, creating friction at critical decision moments
  • Inflexible content management: The component system forced workarounds that undermined performance and brand coherence

These systemic barriers prevented the Museum from achieving core digital objectives: inspiring visits, supporting trip planning, and extending engagement beyond the physical experience.

The Approach

Oomph designed and implemented a comprehensive digital experience system—a fundamental rearchitecture of how the Museum operates online:

  • Strategic alignment: Stakeholder workshops across departments established shared priorities, success metrics, and institutional identity through synthesis of member surveys, analytics, and internal insights
  • User-centered architecture: Mapped visitor journeys for key personas—Museum Members, first-time ticket buyers, on-site visitors, and online researchers—ensuring structure supported real tasks
  • Information architecture transformation: Rebuilt navigation and menu hierarchy from the ground up, validated through TreeJack testing before visual design
  • Accessibility-first component system: Developed component library meeting WCAG 2.2 AA standards, proving accessibility and aesthetic excellence reinforce each other
  • “Gentle elegance” design philosophy: Translated the Gardner’s intimate character into digital form through subtle details—lace patterns and mosaic elements—that inject personality without overwhelming content
  • Strategic page redesigns: Reimagined Visit page balances practical planning information with pathways to deeper content exploration
  • Performance infrastructure: Built technical foundation for speed, reliability, and long-term maintainability

The Result

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum now operates a digital experience system that reflects its institutional values—intimate, intentional, and accessible to all.

The platform performs measurably better across every key visitor behavior. The Museum’s team has infrastructure that supports their mission with clear pathways for ongoing optimization as visitor needs evolve.

The Gardner’s digital presence now prepares visitors for an extraordinary experience, removes barriers to access, and extends the Museum’s distinctive character beyond its physical walls.

Why This Matters

Cultural institutions must honor their distinct identity while meeting contemporary expectations for digital access and usability. The Gardner demonstrates how these priorities reinforce rather than conflict.

By treating digital experience as an integrated system, Oomph helped the Gardner build infrastructure that scales with their mission—creating operational capacity to measure, learn, and continuously improve how they serve visitors online.

This transformation moves metrics: measurable engagement growth, operational efficiency, and strategic flexibility. More fundamentally, it builds systems that help organizations do their most important work better.

THE CHALLENGE

The Challenge

Keene State College (KSC), a liberal arts institution within the University System of New Hampshire, needed a modern, user-friendly website that aligned with its mission while effectively serving multiple audiences.

Over time, the existing site had grown into an overwhelming digital ecosystem, filled with complex navigation, disjointed content, and inconsistent branding. To better serve students and stakeholders, KSC needed to:

  • Prioritize prospective students while maintaining relevance for parents, faculty, and alumni.
  • Simplify content structure to help users quickly find what they need.
  • Modernize the design and user experience while staying true to the college’s brand.
  • Improve accessibility and performance to ensure a seamless experience across all devices.

KSC partnered with Oomph to create a scalable, audience-first digital experience that supports recruitment, engagement, and long-term adaptability.

OUR APPROACH

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:

  • Difficult navigation made it hard for prospective students to find admissions and academic program details.
  • Multiple audiences competing for visibility resulted in a cluttered, confusing user experience.
  • Inconsistent branding and outdated UI weakened the college’s online presence and first impressions.

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.

  • Navigation designed for prospective students while keeping secondary audiences accessible.
  • A scalable mega menu that simplified content discovery without overwhelming users.
  • A brand refresh of the digital identity that modernized KSC’s online presence while maintaining its authenticity.
  • WCAG 2.1 Level AA accessibility compliance to ensure an inclusive experience for all users.

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.

  • Audience-first navigation & mega menu – Prospective students can quickly find key admissions and academic information, while faculty, parents, and alumni have dedicated sections tailored to their needs.
  • Scalable component library – A structured yet flexible design system enables KSC teams to easily update and manage content while maintaining a cohesive visual identity.
  • Optimized for mobile & accessibility – A fully responsive, WCAG-compliant design ensures a seamless experience across all devices.

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.

This team brings creativity and structure to projects. Decisions are based on data and reports, but they include a connection to heart and real world users. They bring in subject matter experts at the appropriate time but never lose site of the big picture.”

DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, Keene State College

THE RESULTS

A Student-Centric Digital Experience

The new Keene State College website now provides:

  • A clear, structured experience for prospective students – Admissions, academics, and student life content is now easier to find and explore.
  • A modernized digital identity – A refreshed brand and UI create a welcoming, engaging first impression.
  • Seamless navigation for multiple audiences – While prospective students remain the priority, faculty, alumni, and parents still have dedicated access points.
  • An accessible, scalable, and future-proof platform – Designed to support long-term growth, engagement, and institutional goals.

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.

Is Your Higher Ed Website Ready for the Next Generation of Students?

If your institution is struggling with outdated content, complex navigation, or disconnected user experiences, a strategic digital approach can create clarity and engagement.

Let’s talk about how Oomph can help your institution stand out in an increasingly competitive higher ed landscape.

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. 

The Brief

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:

  • Modernize the design and attract more web-savvy students to read answers to questions they didn’t know they should ask.
  • Reinforce trust by being open about the process and the real human professionals behind the answers.
  • Improve search, filtering, and findability by leading with topics first and guiding visitors to the types of questions that interest them most.
  • Mitigate and simplify complex authoring processes to empower the small editorial team to answer more questions, support responses with engaging media, and reduce staff frustration.

The Approach

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.

Human responses feel human

With the rise of AI and Google’s AI-generated search results, our design reinforced the humanity and empathy of GAA! by establishing a clear “Dear Alice” with a unique handwritten font and response from the author. When dealing with potentially sensitive and health-threatening answers, an authentic human voice is essential, and one that puts answers into context — is this thing I am asking about “normal”? What are the additional considerations I should know about? And so on. AI might give you one answer, but it won’t contain the context and nuance these anonymous human-generated questions require.

Unique Colors & Illustrations

Blue is strongly associated with Columbia Health and prevented the previous site from standing independently. Our design reduced focus on blue and shifted the site’s primary colors to maroon and yellow. Several other colors create wayfinding paths associated with answer topics. Scrolling the All Topics category page becomes a delightfully random color experience.

All color combinations adhere to WCAG 2.2 guidelines for Level AA, increasing the accessibility of this color-rich site for all visitors. 

A new set of illustrations curates a sense of inclusivity better than stock photos could. A wide variety of humans were chosen to represent the diversity of student populations. Little details, like the randomized person in the site’s footer, add a sense of surprise and delight to the entire browsing experience.

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:

  1. The editor’s name, the answer’s published date, and its revision date were moved from the bottom of an answer and brought to the top. This information helps establish credibility quickly before reading an entire answer
  2. A feedback feature was added to individual answers, giving the GAA! team real-time data about the responses but also giving new visitors a greater sense of social proof
  3. A “Cite this Response” feature makes cutting and pasting an MLA (Modern Language Association) General Format- or Chicago-style academic citation into research papers easy. Since answers are so well-researched, these citations propagate GAA! further into academic culture

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 Results

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!

THE CHALLENGE

Enabling Seamless Content Sharing for NBC’s Local Affiliates

NBC Sports needed a centralized digital platform to streamline content submission, review, and approval for 200+ local affiliate stations covering the Olympics. The Games generate hundreds of hometown stories, and NBC wanted to empower local affiliates to contribute and distribute content efficiently.

The solution needed to:

  • Enable fast, high-volume content submission from affiliate stations. 
  • Implement a structured review and approval workflow to maintain content quality.
  • Facilitate communication between NBC editors and local affiliates.
  • Provide a secure, centralized repository for Olympic assets, training materials, and media.

NBC turned to Oomph to develop a custom-built editorial platform, ensuring a frictionless content pipeline for local Olympic coverage.

OUR APPROACH

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:

  • A structured multi-step review system, ensuring content met NBC standards before publication.
  • An automated notification system, alerting teams when content was submitted, reviewed, or approved.
  • Role-based permissions, restricting publishing rights to authorized users.

Centralizing Olympic Media & Resources

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

  • Training materials & editorial guidelines for covering the Olympics.
  • Olympic-themed graphics, videos, and pre-packaged content.
  • Integrated Digital Asset & Video Management System for encoding, processing, and rights management.

Enhancing Collaboration & Affiliate Profiles

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

  • Stations to create detailed profiles, listing contacts, market details, and associated satellite stations.
  • Direct communication channels, ensuring seamless interaction between NBC staff and local teams.

THE RESULTS

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.

  • 200+ affiliates seamlessly submitted and distributed Olympic stories.
  • Streamlined approval processes reduced editorial bottlenecks.
  • Local stations accessed curated Olympic content, enhancing coverage.
  • Secure, scalable infrastructure supported high traffic volumes.

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