Comments on: Whitney Website Redesign

By: uggs

uggs — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:54:59 +0000

I’m certainly glad will probably be visitor on this sodding website, appreciate your sharing this rare info!

By: Jonathan Cooper

Jonathan Cooper — Tue, 10 May 2011 12:40:43 +0000

Danny, what about the V&A’s Getting here page? Plenty of links there.
I don’t find the navigation hard, although I can’t understand why some menus are “mega” (eg What’s on in the V&A?) and others are just a simple link (eg Learning).

By: danny dugan

danny dugan — Tue, 10 May 2011 10:12:40 +0000

Interesting piece. I wonder if anyone’s seen the recent UK Victoria and Albert Museum website – it appears they just redesigned theirs vam.ac.uk and I was thiking of the whitney when i saw their new site – which looks pretty enough but is atrocious to navigate around and find things. It’s almost like it was designed by robots or something. And weirdly there are NO LINKS anywhere in the text. WTF?

By: molly

molly — Fri, 14 May 2010 21:14:36 +0000

As a professional fundraiser, and one who has worked at several museums, I can attest to the need for the support/membership pieces to be front and center on a museum website. Regardless of exhibitions and collections being the primary focus of a Museum, the only way to sustain an institution is through philanthropic support and memberships. For everything else to exist, this has to be the first priority. Whether or not much revenue is generated through the website, it is imperative for the Museum to place a constant emphasis on its need for support and it makes that the top priority with the placement of those links.

I have a feeling their development department had to work hard for that.

Where the rest of it is concerned, I find it to feel “unfriendly” and slightly intimidating. I don’t need a hug from a website, but this one comes off a bit gruff.

By: Kelvin

Kelvin — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:00:22 +0000

This review is terrible. It assumes a lot of things that could only be known if you were in a conversation with the institution. For instance, the comment regarding Support & Membership. I wouldn’t be surprised if these are 2 of the most important things to the museum considering this is what really allows a museum to operate and museums are really struggling these days. Things like Exhibitions are absolutely important but more often than not people visiting the site are seeking info on Exhibitions so they already have their radar on for those words and could easily find them.

Second, this site functions more as a tool than most museum sites. Page structures are different for what appear to be logical reasons. For instance, Education sections feature tag clouds prominently which brig popular terms to the forefront. Most sections of the site are housing different forms of content and there is no reason to fit the entire site into one structure. A single structure has become less necessary especially if you consider that the Whitney facebook page is as much an extension of this site as the Research section of the site and it has its own Facebook structure.

The colors may not be the most attractive but I can’t help but notice the bold green calendars when I land on a page. I think that’s a great thing.

As far as deviating from grids … I think that’s such an old conversation and too tied to the print world. I would look at this as a series of building blocks as opposed to a restrictive grid. I could go on …

By: Vincent Roman

Vincent Roman — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 20:09:32 +0000

Mike, I don’t think anyone is even advocating something pretty. Merely usable, functional, and properly instituted would be nice!

By: MikeM

MikeM — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 17:58:49 +0000

So often, people think a Web site needs to be pretty (this isn’t) and full of multimedia and interactivity without understanding that you first need to make a ton of information as easily absorbable and accessible as possible.

By: Gemma

Gemma — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 07:34:08 +0000

i’m surprised that the whitney hasn’t implement amy post-launch fixes or addressed the blogosphere’s critiques of the site. this stonewalling attitude seems to undermine the very spirit of the website and its mission to engage with the art and museum community in a meaningful or relevant way.

on a positive note, i just caught a glimpse of the metropolitan museum of art’s new website–beautiful work.

By: Vincent Roman

Vincent Roman — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 10:29:40 +0000

Jonathan, thanks for the comment and glad you generally agree. I ridicule the collection feature because, although I like it, its execution is weak. More time, effort, and proper thought to make it a coherent element within the Whitney site and I would be the first wont to give it awards!

By: Jonathan Cooper

Jonathan Cooper — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 05:33:17 +0000

Interesting reading. There are some aspects of the new Whitney site that I quite like, but I agree: menus where individual items leave their position in the stack and scoot up to the top is disorienting, and odd. As is the pseudo-tag-cloud on the Education page. Vincent Roman ridicules the “My Collection” feature and the way you can add PAGES to it and watch it as a slideshow, but I like it. Definitely a site to watch.

By: pixel8te

pixel8te — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 03:56:34 +0000

FWIW, colleagues who know the firm’s principals say they are well-liked and affable, and have chosen to not criticize the site on these grounds. I do think civility has its place when critiquing work, and I agree with the above commenter who said this reflects worse on the org’s decision makers than the firm. That being said, anybody who looks at the site’s source code would have a hard time arguing that this site was well constructed. No doubt, unreasonable client demands and timelines (mainstays of any web project ;-)) are partially to blame, but still…

By: bullet

bullet — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:04:12 +0000

New Whitney website is quite beautiful visually and easy to navigate then any other museum websites out there.

By: Website Updates & Handling a Negative Response

Website Updates & Handling a Negative Response — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 08:07:01 +0000

[...] on-going involvement in discussions surrounding the update to the Whitney Museum web site brings to the fore many of these lessons I [...]

By: Terry: Hollister Design

Terry: Hollister Design — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 15:20:32 +0000

I enjoyed your “step by step” assessment of what was going on with the Whitney’s website and how you chose to address it. Inconsistencies in type, visual design and navigation really impact the user; every site should act to improve their user experience by improving consistency.

By: Vincent Roman

Vincent Roman — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:30:32 +0000

Steffen, I am in the same boat as you. The form for signing up was a little bloated and hould really have required nothing more than a username and pass. As you suggest beyond 5 links and 1 pages of collected items the thing is unusable. There is no collection specific search/filter which would easily fix that problem. Another thing I hated was that there was no obvious limit on the caption text and it was merely truncated without warning.

Regarding the dataset which you were talking about, all I see is code for Google Analytics. I doubt they are using anything else like Omniture for more detailed analysis of user journeys etc. Who knows how much they have thought about sch things. The notion that they haven’t thought at all about it irks me.

By way of example, if you go to the old Calder artist page it 404s, ie. PAGE NOT FOUND. This is dumb, because it is not like the content has changed. Google and other services advise webmasters to use 301 redirects to advice spiders that the content ha permanently moved and to garner the new address so that indexes can be updated quickly and traffic not lost. Given that on top of this the design of the 404 page s awful hardly helps. Compounding this, from what I can see is that they have NO sitemap.xml file telling the spiders where to find the most up-to-date library of links on the site.

Anyhow, back to the long term use of such tools, unless they are all using the same services its harder to compare like for like, and i doubt anyone would necessarily openly talk about such stats, well perhaps the IMA would. The only way to make sch things as sticking as possible is to make the functionality as simple and as effective as possible to use and to make it relevant to the everyday lives of its users. In terms of prior art, Digg, Delicious and even functionality such as Last.fm’s library and song kicks resources tracker. Forcing people to use one site though is a mistake and embracing many of these Web 2.0 services, as suggested by Nina Simon, is definitely the way to go, people don;t need more places to go, they need better service int he place they use already.

Anyhow, I can’t stay on topic so will hush for now :)

By: Steffen Boddeker

Steffen Boddeker — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 01:35:31 +0000

Vincent – yes, I did sign up to try it. This tool is not well developed for any collection over 5 objects, and one of the biggest draw-backs in my view is not being able to create notes associated with specific elements. Placing these at the bottom of an endless page is a little like putting a post-it on my desk.
My question here was if Perry or anyone reading knows of any quantitative info on the long-term use of such register-and-collect tools beyond the Whitney. I wonder how much repeat use even more sophisticated ones like MoMA’s get.

By: Vincent Roman

Vincent Roman — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:49:04 +0000

Steffen, have you actually tried to sign up and use the my collection feature on the site? I did, and I can tell you some of it makes NO sense. The collection is really a library of bookmarked pages, as you cant actually add images to the ‘collection’ and as a result when you go to the ‘slideshow’ element of My Collection, it kind of makes a joke out of the process of watching the collection. There are plenty of other flaws i could point out, but those I think are for review No 2 :)

By: Steffen Boddeker

Steffen Boddeker — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:14:22 +0000

Thanks Perry for this thoughtful breakdown. A very relevant discussion not only in light of the Whitney site, but many other museum sites in the process (or need) of redesign.

I am especially interested in your comments about the My Collection section, and share your inkling that these features probably don’t get too much repeat use in the long run. It would be interesting to understand more about this aspect. Many are fairly recent additions to museum sites, but I wonder if anyone has shared info on user behavior in these log-in sections.

By: Another Take on the New Whitney Website | Plog

Another Take on the New Whitney Website | Plog — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:59:24 +0000

[...] Whitney Website Redesign [...]

By: Vincent Roman

Vincent Roman — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:24:24 +0000

Perry -

Excellent post and I am glad to see that others hold the same opinion as me and have taken to lengthy discussion of the topic as have I. You can find my review of the new whitney.org here:

http://www.vincentroman.com/blog/a-review-of-the-new-whitney-website/

Much of which mirrors what you are saying.

To respond to MS, I think that the mission of the museum is important and whether or not the site conveys that is important also, but at the same time, they have a commitment to site and museum visitors to make the experience as accessible and as easy as possible to use. We are not in a game here to figure out how hard we can make it for users to find what they need on the site. This is about common sense and a clean approach to inviting those who are already interest in what you offer, in.

Whether you think the site is cool or not doesn’t belie the fact that there are both legal and unwritten obligations in design sites, and if you aren’t going to follow them you might as well pack up shop now.

Thanks again Perry and to all those wading in on this conversation.