Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is one of Australia’s most distinctive cultural institutions, attracting visitors from around the world. The existing website needed to better support how visitors plan their trips, explore exhibitions, and purchase tickets — particularly the unique journey of travelling to the museum by ferry from Hobart.
James Calhoun led the UX/UI redesign of MONA's website (2023–24.) This project focused on redesigning the website to create a clearer, more engaging digital experience that reflects MONA’s bold brand while simplifying key visitor journeys. A major challenge was improving the booking experience, including designing a combined ferry and museum ticket flow that helps visitors plan their visit more easily.
MONA
My role
I was the lead designer on the MONA website redesign, responsible for shaping the visual design and user experience across key journeys. I facilitated stakeholder workshops to align business and visitor needs, conducted guerrilla usability testing to validate design decisions, and led the creation of a cohesive visual system for the site. A key focus of my role was simplifying complex booking flows, including designing a combined ferry and museum ticket experience that streamlined how visitors plan their trip to the museum.
Working with project managers, creative directors and developers across multiple product teams.
Information architecture
What we learned
Research across visitor interviews, stakeholder conversations and behavioural data revealed three issues: visitors struggled with fragmented ticket and ferry booking, many weren't discovering MONA's wider experiences, and trip planning was predominantly happening on mobile.
These findings led us to focus on three things: simplify booking, surface more of the MONA ecosystem, and preserve the museum's sense of discovery.
Museum entry and Ferry combined booking flow
The challenge
MONA is entered by ferry from Hobart. Transport is part of the experience, not just a means to get there, but the old site treated museum entry and ferry booking as two separate transactions instead of one journey. Visitors also struggled to see what MONA offered beyond basic admission, and the site itself didn't reflect the personality of the physical experience.
What I discovered
Ferry + museum are one journey Most visitors treated transport and admission as a single task.
MONA was underselling itself Visitors were unaware of many dining, art and event experiences.
Mobile mattered most Most trip planning happened on mobile.
No itinerary
MONA's brand ruled out anything that read like a corporate travel planner: itineraries, schedules, checklists. But visitors left holding more than they could remember, exhibitions, dining, events and art, found non-linearly through a browsing experience built for discovery.
The answer was a Saved list. Visitors could collect anything they found, add notes, and share it with whoever they were travelling with. No order, no times, just what they wanted to remember. It solved "help me remember" without ever answering "tell me what to do and when," the one question the brand ruled out.
The decision
Two options were on the table: keep ferry and museum entry fully separate, or link them sequentially, museum first, then a prompt for the ferry. Both were simple enough, since the ferry ran on a separate system with its own pricing, run by an external contractor with no shared data.
I pushed for a combined flow instead. Sequential still read as two transactions when the ferry and museum are really one trip. Since the systems couldn't talk to each other, I mapped every possible combination up front and built the logic so the visitor's answers resolved the right ticket pairing behind the scenes. One flow on the surface, the correct pairing resolved underneath, without the visitor ever reconciling two bookings themselves.
Home page
Home page index
The decision
The obvious route was a traditional grid, exhibitions and events laid out by category or date. It's what most museum sites do, and it would have been straightforward to build.
It didn't fit MONA. A grid ranks and categorises, and MONA's content doesn't sit neatly in categories; serious exhibitions, dining, events and outright inside jokes all carry equal weight to the museum's identity. Forcing that into a grid would have flattened it into something that looked like every other cultural institution's website, which was the opposite of what MONA is.
The index structure came out of a workshop conversation with the creative director, sparked by a discussion I raised about different ways to distil dense information. It let content sit side by side regardless of type, closer to how a printed catalogue works than a website menu, which gave MONA room to be playful and exploratory rather than organised for the visitor's convenience.
The homepage index was designed to surface experiences through a discovery-driven browsing model. The homepage uses an “index” structure inspired by early printed catalogues and the Gutenberg Bible. This allows MONA to present art, experiences, and inside jokes in a non-linear way that reflects the museum’s playful and exploratory identity. The typography cleverly blends serif and sans-serif fonts, juxtaposing the old and new.
MONA, Art and Music
Art and Music
The art and exhibitions experience was designed to make browsing feel exploratory while still giving visitors enough structure to find what they need. Content, imagery, and navigation patterns work together to support discovery across MONA’s programme. Images where designed to be a floating stack a reference to the curatorial aspect of MONA.
Design system
We needed the system to support highly editorial content without forcing MONA into conventional card-based layouts. Components therefore established consistency around type, spacing and interaction while allowing art direction to remain deliberately unpredictable.
Open navigation
Results
Post-launch research showed a 30% higher completion rate in the new booking flow.
The simplified booking journey increased ferry bookings by 35 %
Increased upsell experiences by 25%, and improved the visibility of exhibitions and events.