Finalist 2021

ACMI website

Liquorice / ACMI

A new digital ecosystem for ACMI's museum of screen culture.

Liquorice designed and developed ACMI's new digital ecosystem, including the website, key interactive signage throughout the new, permanent physical exhibition called The Story of the Moving Image, and an extension to the physical museum experience called The Lens.

Design Brief

Following a rebrand and major $40m refurbishment of their Fed Square museum space, ACMI engaged Liquorice to update their website, and to design the UX and UI for key interactive signage throughout the new, permanent physical exhibition called The Story of the Moving Image.

We were also given the opportunity to design an extension to the museum experience, centred around a device called The Lens, aimed at enriching the museum experience in the digital space.

Then COVID happened. Suddenly, the website needed to be more than a website. It needed to be a fully-formed digital expression of ACMI.


This project was developed by:

Design Process

We conducted market and customer research analysis, and interviewed real ACMI visitors to understand their goals and frustrations. We sat down with the ACMI team and established aspirations and expectations, giving ourselves the tools to measure success throughout the project. We then created user personas and user journeys, synthesising a broad range of users into 5 key groups.

Next, we created an early sitemap and presented it along with a tonne of questions, which allowed us to define the content structures that the site would be built around.

After extensive competitor and design research, we embarked on a huge series of stakeholder workshops and prototype sprints to find solutions to some current website challenges. We designed low fidelity wireframes for each key page of the website and tested them with users; both to validate some of the IA decisions made early on and to gauge the success of the designs thus far.

ACMI’s offering is unique in that it’s so varied. In addition to their core offerings of film screenings and exhibitions, they also regularly host festivals, film seasons and programs, workshops, exhibitions, talks, tours and performances. We wanted to present all these experiences in a consistent way, helping users to seamlessly navigate from one to the other, so we designed a robust, flexible event template – one that would work just as well for presenting a long-term exhibition as it would for a single workshop.

Design Excellence

Liquorice helped to create a groundbreaking online experience that is set to re-imagine museum culture as we know it.

The project has been an enormous undertaking, putting all of Liquorice's skills and smarts into action - a full cast of digital strategists, UX designers and researchers, project managers, and of course the heroes behind the velvet curtain, our brilliant developers. The result is a beautiful, user-delighting, high-performing digital experience.

Design Innovation

Liquorice was engaged to create an online experience in which ACMI's physical and digital content were more intertwined than ever before.

The first exhibition showcased in this new model was 'The Story of the Moving Image', a free online version of what will be a permanent, 1600-square-metre exhibition at the museum – exploring how film has shaped who we are, how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. Users can literally take home their own piece of the museum via The Lens experience.

The Lens is a free handheld, take-home device that lets you collect the artworks and objects that you discover on the website (thanks to some serious fancy footwork from our masterful Liquorice tech team) and continue the museum experience after you’ve left.

Seamlessly translating the experience of an in-person visit to the museum into an immersive online adventure was always going to be innovative, but COVID necessitated a more dramatic pivot into innovation. No cultural centre was more prepared to give users an at-home museum experience.

Design Impact

Liquorice is thrilled to see the wonderful response that our friends at ACMI have had to their digital transformation, and ever since its launch last week, the website has been receiving rave reviews from across the globe.

This new museum experience helps ACMI to broaden its impact, opening up new social and commercial opportunities to connect with its patrons. It's also a powerful way for Victoria to demonstrate the resilience and strength of its arts and museum culture and show the rest of Australia and the world that, even in the most locked-down city in the world, our cultural institutions go on.

Digital Design 2021 Finalists

Yalinguth

Storyscape / Max Piantoni / The Wurundjeri Council (Uncle Colin Hunter, Charley Woolmore) / Melbourne Community Indigenous Film Collective(Uncle Robert Bundle) / Yarnin Pictures (Uncle Bobby Nicholls, Rebecca McLean) / RMIT University – MAGI (Chris Barker, Kate Cawley) / Melbourne University Design (Janet McGaw, Jillian Wallis)

64 Ways of Being

Troy Innocent / one step at a time like this / Millipede / Creative Victoria / RMIT University

GetMee

GetMee / Education Centre of Australia - Loren Dsouza / Deakin University - Professor Pubudu Pathirana / Ally Kim - Beta Customer / Anjali Kushwah - Experience Designer / Mary-Anne Quezel - Leadership and Emotional Intelligence Coach / Suzanne Northey - Behavioral Therapist and Psychologist

Automated Briefings and Correspondence - ABC

Sophie Turner / Jasmin Hamid / Ben Kirk / James Stuart and the DPC Operations Team / Engage Squared / Rapid Circle

Rarau mai Living city

OOM Creative / Auckland War Memorial Museum