Using community consultation to shape online collections
Helping to shape Fashion Museum Bath's online presence
Earlier this year, we were fortunate enough to work on a great project with Fashion Museum Bath.
Fashion Museum Bath holds one of the world’s leading collections of fashion, spanning 100,000 items from 1600 to the present day, with strengths in European, especially British, fashionable dress and accessories. It also encompasses sketches, fashion magazines, fashion photography and designers’ archives.
The Museum is currently closed until 2030 as the team build up to reopening in a new location in the centre of the city.
In 2024, they secured Arts Council England (ACE) funding to invest in how their collection displays online, as, for the next couple of years, that will be the main place the public will be able to view it.
This article describes how we at One Further worked with local residents and fashion students to help shape what the new online presence would look like. With the Museum, we were particularly interested to hear from young people as the future majority users of the collection.
Card sorting existing digitised material
At the outset of the project, there was just one area of the collection digitised on https://www.fashionmuseum.co.uk/ – the Dress of the Year collection. However, the Museum knew it wanted to expand this during closure. As the wider online collections expanded, it was only going to become more important to understand how the public, and particularly the users of this part of the site, want to be able to browse and sort Fashion Museum collection content.
To get this understanding, we created a card sorting exercise. We printed every Dress of the Year outfit onto cards. We then asked community participants, in groups of 3-4, to suggest category headings and filters to allow them to group this set in ways they would personally find interesting and meaningful.
What we found:
The most common single sorting rationale was chronological – people most commonly wanted to know when the garments were made.
However, beyond that, there were other, fascinating ways – particularly more specialist – users wanted to sort images. For example:
Makers particularly wanted to sort by textile, colour and country
Students and young people suggested it would be interesting to filter garments that had a political or social statement behind them
There was an interest in sorting by outfit type; whether this was occasion wear vs streetwear, whether it was couture or high street.
Evaluating digital media about fashion
While they’re closed, the Museum wants to publish stories about the collection, to hook new and existing users, and help drive traffic to their collections online.
To understand more about what might be most effective here, we presented a range of digital media to participants – from TikTok videos to snippets from longer-form YouTube videos, through to blog posts and collections-related articles.
What we found:
Reels and longer-form video content performed the best with specialists and non-specialists alike. They were generally short enough to capture non-specialists’ attention but not too glib/shallow to put specialists off.
There was interest in Instagram feed posts, although generally participants wanted more information in the image itself, rather than having to rely on the caption to make sense of the post.
Short-form video on TikTok tended to be enjoyed by those who knew and used TikTok (more prevalent amongst non-specialists and younger audiences in our group), but those users did say that they were unlikely to remember who posted the content. Those who weren’t on TikTok generally found the content peculiar and not informative.
Blog content was the most divisive. Specialists tended to rank it as the best content, as it gave them the most detail and they learnt the most from it, but they had to already be interested in the topic. Non-specialists struggled to maintain their attention for the 6 minutes they were given to the task of reading the article and found it one of the more boring and labour-intensive ways of digesting information. Both groups agreed they’d be relatively unlikely to serendipitously land on a blog page, compared to passively receiving social content.
Ultimately, fashion-invested audiences are very visual; they want to get a sense of how garments move, what they look like from the back, how heavy the material is and how they were constructed. This is generally easier to communicate in a video than in a series of static images.
Usability testing different ways of presenting collections online
In this part of the workshop, we presented participants with a range of different online fashion collection websites and asked them to comment on how easy they were to i) browse ii) find specific queries in; in this case, a ‘red dress’.
Users were most impressed by more imaginative and content-led approaches to collection discovery – the Historic Royal Palaces ‘Royal Wardrobe’ on Google Arts and Culture was a particular favourite, with notable highlights around the very high level of zoom on collection pieces, the colour wheel collections search, and the level of interactivity on the site:
For more specific queries, traditional museum sites tended to score low. They tended to be overly broad in matching a term like ‘red dress’ and return lots of items that were neither largely red nor a dress. This contrasted to e-commerce sites like Net-a-Porter, which was preferred for the quality of the photography and the accuracy of the search (but disliked for the amount of pop-ups).
AI and conversational interfaces
We also looked at a number of AI-driven interfaces for collections discovery. The responses here were eye-opening. Users tended to find the experience of these tools shallow, and they didn’t always rate or trust the results or the depth of accurate information it was surfacing.
Image preference
Our last exercise involved getting feedback on preferred photography styles. Over the next couple of years, Fashion Museum Bath will be digitising much more of its collection, and it therefore has a decision to make, to either:
Digitise more, but with lower-grade imagery
Digitise less, but with higher quality items
Interestingly, in the context of fashion, specialists and non-specialists alike found it far more useful to have fewer, better images. Many non-specialists were put off by non-professional photography (even on major collections sites), which they felt gave “Vinted vibes”. Many felt that an overall aesthetic was important to their browsing experience, but also that more detailed collection shots were what they would need to advance their interest, both as specialists; from a construction point of view, and as generalists; to spark any interest in the item in the first place.
Next steps for the Museum
Fashion Museum Bath is now at the design and build stage of the Explore the Collection project, and will be carrying out further user testing over the autumn to gather more feedback about the prototype. All of this community consultation work is feeding directly into the decisions about how the prototype site will look and function.
The prototype is due to launch in early 2026. Watch this space!
I’m now on maternity leave, so you won’t be hearing any more from me for some time, but you’ll be in the expert hands of Louise Cohen. See you from around September 2026!