Designing and developing the Jelenarchívum platform

Project Goals

The Museum of Ethnography approached us with the goal of designing the digital interface for Jelenarchívum. The project, developed within the the MaDok program, focuses on collecting, organizing, and preserving photographs and personal stories from recent decades – from the 1990s to the present day. The archive allows the museum to document contemporary photographic practices while also expanding its modern-day collections.

What makes the archive unique is its emphasis on mapping the connection between images and the personal narratives behind them. Rather than focusing solely on visuals, it highlights storytelling as a key component. Through thematic collection campaigns, users are invited to contribute their own photos and related stories, becoming part of a living, community-driven archive. Our goal was to create a user experience that not only encourages photo and story submissions but also enables visitors to explore and engage with existing content in a meaningful way.

Challenges

One of the key challenges was to reflect the museum’s open, community-focused approach in the platform design while ensuring broad accessibility for diverse audiences.

Jelenarchívum was developed in collaboration with Fortepan – a public-domain photo archive documenting life in Hungary up to the 1990s. This partnership required us to ensure temporal and thematic continuity between the two archives.

Since the platform is built around recurring thematic campaigns, it was crucial to develop a long-term, flexible architecture. We needed to design a technical and content framework capable of supporting the collection of visual and narrative material across multiple research topics – without requiring a structural overhaul for each new theme.

Simplifying and supporting the upload process was also a key design priority. At the same time, we had to ensure that submissions met archival quality standards. Given the diverse nature of user-generated content – varying in resolution, aspect ratio, and image quality – the platform needed to be adaptable. The same applied to the variety in story formats and text lengths.

Legal considerations around copyright and user rights were also central. We needed to embed these requirements into the upload flow in a way that felt seamless and user-friendly, while remaining clear and transparent. Additionally, we had to account for numerous real-world user scenarios – such as interrupted uploads, draft saving, story length limitations, and ensuring long-form texts remained readable on both mobile and desktop devices.

Design and Development Process

1. Research & Analysis

To lay a strong foundation, we began with stakeholder interviews to understand the needs and expectations of both museum staff and potential contributors. We also conducted a benchmark analysis of similar national and international platforms specializing in community storytelling and photo archiving. These insights helped shape our design strategy and inform UX decisions.

2. UX / UI Design

Our UX work focused on designing intuitive flows that would support both user-generated content and content discovery. Key features included:
A guided registration and login process

• Flexible filtering and search functionality
• A multi-step photo and story submission flow
  The upload process was divided into clear, easy-to-follow steps, allowing users to save drafts, return later, and enter metadata essential for archiving.
  Listing and detail pages for submitted content
• Browsing and navigation with Fortepan connection
  We created a unified timeline component to connect Fortepan and Jelenarchívum entries, allowing users to filter and explore content by year.
• Thematic collection pages
  These dedicated campaign pages present the context of each collection and encourage user participation. They also support supplementary content like sample submissions, background material, and related events.
• A logged-in user dashboard
  This interface allows users to track the status of their uploaded photos and stories (e.g., draft, under review, published) and gives them the option to edit or update their content after submission.

3. Visual Design & Design System

We designed the visual interface to align with the Museum of Ethnography’s digital identity. The design system ensures a consistent look and feel across components and devices, reinforcing user trust and institutional credibility.

4. Development

We built the entire Jelenarchívum platform on Craft CMS. Based on the design plans, we created the necessary content types and field structures, and we set up an admin interface that is clear and easy to use for the museum’s team. The core features – user registration, login, photo and story submission, editing, and publishing – were all implemented as custom modules. This allowed us to tailor the system exactly to the project’s needs.

One of the biggest challenges was developing the multi-step publishing workflow. Users can first save their stories and photos as drafts, then submit them for approval. Administrators review these submissions on a dedicated interface and decide whether to publish them. We created custom backend logic to handle this process.

On the frontend, we used Tailwind CSS and vanilla JavaScript. For more complex features – such as search, filtering of results, and the entire submission flow – we built Vue.js components. The design system was well-structured, which made it easy to implement using Tailwind utility classes. Throughout development, we ensured the site met WCAG AA accessibility standards.

Development followed an iterative process. Once we had a working version, we held internal reviews and demos with the design team before presenting anything to the client. This helped us deliver thoughtful, high-quality solutions every time.

The result is a sustainable and scalable platform that supports both individual storytelling and the museum’s long-term archival and research goals.

Results and Outcomes

The Jelenarchívum platform launched successfully and quickly generated strong community engagement. Within the first months, two thematic campaigns were already live, and users had submitted over 140 photographs and personal stories.

The success of the project was grounded in the close collaboration with the Museum of Ethnography, which remained actively involved from the initial concept phase through to implementation. The museum’s professional background and the design and development team’s digital expertise complemented each other well throughout the process.

In line with the platform’s long-term goals, planning for further functional development is ongoing. These future improvements aim to better support content collection, encourage user engagement, and serve research and archiving needs more effectively.