Hot on the heels of the SFMOMA website redesign comes the Hammer Museum’s new site.

It’s a knockout that weaves together many threads of programming – events, exhibitions, and the crucial multimedia that bind users to a site – into a cohesive experience that satisfys the needs of many kinds of visitors.  Even better, they’ve embraced an openness to multimedia distribution and sharing so unusual among organizations of this type.  A user can subscribe to the museum’s offerings through podcasts or RSS, embed video or audio into their own website, or post content to content sharing sites like Facebook.  These are fundamentals in 2008 which a lot of museum sites still aren’t embracing.

The design team also came up with a minimal and elegant design that frames the museum’s programming transparently, throwing emphasis onto the many visuals the museum naturally generates through its events and exhibitions.

The Hammer also has crack crew making sure their site runs smoothly.  Audio and video and images are everywhere and that’s a testament to all the little monkeys behind the scenes who are producing, cropping, editing, formatting, and posting this material.

Tip o’ the hat, folks.

I confess that when I first went to their site I was nervous it was going to be an all-Flash hell hole on the order of the epic disaster that is The Kitchen’s website: a nightmare of an interface, a buggy, error-filled disaster that probably halves attendance figures because content is so freakishly hard to find and so garishly designed.  The Kitchen’s website is made even more painful because of how it stands in such stark contrast to their outstanding programming.  Although I have many friends that work at that august institution, I have no idea what happened behind the scenes that led to their digital debacle.  I’ll assume it has something to do with an overworked staff entrusting the project to developers who had absolutely no business making websites.  It’s a total heap and needs to be redesigned completely and immediately for institutional solvency.

Anyway.  Back to The Hammer.

It turns out that Flash is limited to the homepage and discreetly around the site in audio and video modules and an effective (if random) interactive Membership matrix.

Featured programs are listed on the homepage (although I wish it would say “Featured” since I thought that all I saw on the homepage was all that was at the museum (wrong)).  They’ve nicely integrated video into the homepage (but didn’t allow it to go fullscreen).  The full bleed background images switch as the user selects different featured programs – cute.  Upcoming events are conveniently listed on the bottom.  It works.  It’s full of stuff but is coherent and offers a lot of info in a compressed way.

The real killer feature – and it’s simple – is the section that drops down from the main horizontal navigation bar when you roll over major section headers.  Mouse over “Exhibitions” and before you click into the unknown, a helpful menu drops down to show you what to expect: exhibitions on view, etc.  For each section the dropdown area shows you the most important stuff.  It’s so good.  They’ve really done a nice job of not forcing people to click, instead enabling users to find things simply by hovering.

I like how they list their current and upcoming exhibitions together on the Exhibtions landing page but it’s a bit obnoxious that in order to see more current exhibitions one has to click a tiny right arrow for the other thumbnails to slide in.  Hammer: just have it drop to the next level.  This type of hard-to-find-button-to-push-to-see-more-stuff won’t pass the mom test.  Also I’m not sure if segregating the past exhibitions into its own area is necessary but it works well nonetheless.

The Programs section does what SFMOMA’s didn’t do: tag lots and lots of images to every single event.  I know from firsthand experience that it’s annoying and it’s grunt work but it makes the section look visually delectable and encourages visitors to click on things they otherwise wouldn’t.

The Collections sections provides an overview but doesn’t even attempt to put anything online.  Bummer, but they’ll have time to fundraise for that functionality in the future.  In that case they can look to SFMOMA who did a great job.  And the Met, of course, who does an even greater job (and from what I’ve heard will be launching some exciting new online collections soon).

The best part of the site is the “Watch and Listen” section which does what every museum should be doing: have a whole section fully and totally devoted to the gobs of audio and video that they are producing.  The Hammer nails this section.  First off, you can watch things right there on the website but you can also embed it into your site or subscribe to the podcast feed.  SO BASIC BUT SO GOOD.  Why can’t most every other place get this so right?  Filtering works well but Search doesn’t.  Just to see if search functionality actually functioned, I searched for words that I saw in the titles: “Lopate” and “Arbus” in my case.  It said nothing could be found.  Uh.  Tsk tsk.  Fix this.  I also wish there was a browsable list of all the multimedia participants so I could just skim and see if my favorite artist was there.

I’m not sure why the section is called “News and Blogs.”  How many blogs do they have?  As far as I can tell it’s just one.  And just call it “News.”  I don’t think you have to drop the “B” word.

The user interface is really elegant and smartly prepared.  Content flows intuitively and key information is presented immediately with secondary or extra information accessible through a mouse click.  I would boost the overall site font size.  Small looks sexy but it’s hard to read for a lot of (older) visitors.

All in all – this site is a real triumph and the team behind it should be complimented on an outstanding offering.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern art (SFMOMA) has redesigned their website, sfmoma.org, after more than 8 years.  The new site takes few risks, adhering to conservative and time-tested user interface and design standards.  As a result, it’s a success – head and shoulders above most of the museum websites in its class.

Of course, it’s not perfect but first with the good and then with the bad:

Simple, clear, consistent user interface
The navigation interface is in the time-tested, user-approved tradition of horizontal navigation bars.  Sure, it’s conventional but it works.  Things stay put as you go from section to section and as a result, the site coheres.  Some museums try to go experimental and end up user interface nightmares.  Take, for example, the Indianapolis Museum of Art.  Look at the IMA’s frightfully confusing homepage.  There are literally three separate content sections with their own horizontal tabbed-interface bars instead of one unifying interface.  How do I know where to click?  Inundated in a deluge of information, I’d rather leave than “explore” which is what most of these bad websites expect visitors to do.  That assumption is wrong.  90% of visitors want to get in and get out.  10% are ready for some exploration.  The Metropolitan Museum is a user interface disaster of another order.  Many times its navigation bar COMPLETELY DISAPPEARS after a mouse click leaving a visitor with no navigation reference.  That’s one site in need of a serious overhaul.  There are others that need redesigns too.

SFMOMA has one of the most logical, organized, and consistent navigation structures among museum sites making it stand tall amongst its peers.  Thoughtful and smart copy, too.

Good use of Flash
There’s been some griping about the Flash introduction SFMOMA uses on their homepage: too fast! too much stimulation!  As the guy that runs the New Museum website I can tell you that since the average site visitor will give you about 1 minute of their precious time, you better offer as many visuals as possible in the hopes of stimulating a longer visit.  SFMOMA understands this imperative and their Flash intro is smart.  It will show visitors with extraordinarily short attention spans (most) what’s on view in an engaging way and encourage them to learn about those exhibitions.  It’s also nicely designed; if you roll over one of the items it pauses so you can carefully look at the picture or read the text.  That’s considerate.  Compare this to MoMA’s lumbering Flash show which is too boring, too slow, and keeps rolling on irrespective of user attempts to pause it.  Also, SFMOMA is using sIFR to render non-websafe fonts.  It’s done really well and it’s nice to see such a good implementation.

Good design
This is completely subjective but I like the boxy, flat design of the site.  No faddish gradients, rounded corners, or pinstripes.  It’s a simple and elegant container to house the text and images that make a museum site so strong.

Information rich
SFMOMA has a massive amount of content – events, exhibitions, collections, education initiatives – on and on.  Their calendar tool is very powerful and well organized: clearly showing information and allowing for fine-grained filtering.  The search tool is surprisingly good.  The collection highlights encourage exploration without resorting to visual tricks.

But with the good comes the bad.

No RSS or iCal
I’m very unlikely to visit the site repeatedly but if updates were to drift into my RSS feed or into my calendar – then I’m far more likely to stay connected to the museum.  This omission is completely unforgivable in a modern website.
SFMOMA: add RSS and iCal right now.

Hidden email signup form
A site, heck, a museum, thrives on email outreach.  Why bury the email signup form in the Exhibitions and Events section?  It’s illogical.  More emails means more contact which means more members and more visits.
SFMOMA: put your email subscription form on every single page.

Confusing Events and Exhibitions section
This is going to be SFMOMA’s most frequently visited section and its contents are surprisingly unclear.  The Exhibitions column is broken into two sections – what appear to be Featured Exhibitions and Other Current Exhibitions.  The necessity of a horizontal division is questionable (isn’t the difference in size enough?).  But if they insist on a horizontal break, each should be titled.  As it currently stands it interrupts the understanding that all of these exhibitions are happening at once.  Also, Events should have pictures associated with them.  I happen to know who RoseLee Goldberg is and I also happen to know who Tom Marioni is but the majority of site visitors will not be art geeks and would rather click on a picture of a woman with a bob or a photograph of a bottle of beer.  People don’t click on words; they click on pictures. SFMOMA: don’t do it for all events – far too big a task – but add pictures to Featured events.

Confusing Exhibitions detail page

Take this page as a sample of their Exhibition page template: http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/306
Their design is based on keeping things “above the fold” – the 600 pixel height that content can appear in safely without the user having to scroll down to see it.  To keep things above the fold they are making people click.  But they’ve gotten it all wrong.  People aren’t afraid to scroll, they are afraid to click. When you scroll, you know where you are and you know where you’re going.  When you click, you have no idea what’s going to happen or what’s going to change.  Amazon.com and their millions in user testing is proof of the power of the scroll.  Their product pages are incredibly long but Amazon knows that’s preferable to a user than a click-intensive option.

The way that subsection content relates to the overall exhibition detail page is not intuitive.  If you click “Participating Artists” under “Related Links” you are shown the list of artists and the other related links but the main exhibition information is gone and you have to click “Back to Exhibition Page” to get there.  That’s just bad design, folks.  Since these “Related Links” well, relate, directly to the exhibition at hand, it’s important to keep that Exhibition overview information on the same page.
SFMOMA: put all the exhibition content on one, long page.

I’ll leave it there.  I know that the web team has a list longer than mine of bugs, design issues, and problems they need to fix.  Also, they’ve likely got close to zero budget for user testing so this is effectively their beta release.  Keep going SFMOMA!  You’re doing alright.

The SFMOMA’s two massive Sol LeWitt atrium wall drawings – the last works still up from his retrospective in 2000 – are being painted over to make room for an upcoming Martin Puryear installation.

It doesn’t sadden me that they’re no longer on view.  Because the instruction set is the kernel of the work and can lead to infinite authentic resurrections, the piece is simply in one less place.  What’s more poignant to me is that after eight years the exhibition that changed the course of my personal, artistic, and professional life has finally concluded.

I feel fortunate that my first encounter with Conceptual Art wasn’t a chilly philosophical affair.  For while a Kosuth or Art and Language show would has been just as likely to pique my interest in this realm of art making, I’m grateful that it came in visual terms.  And in Sol’s unique way.  His work’s breathtaking delicacy, lyricism, intellectual rigor, and modesty are core features of the best art I could make and, by proxy, of the best life I could lead.

While his SFMOMA retrospective is now relegated to memory, I suppose it always was.  Our lives are lived in recollection, looking back on the wake of experience cast off from the fleeting present.

And since Sol’s work is fundamentally about the idea behind the work his pieces seem architected in the language of memory.  It’s appropriate, then, that his retrospective is now over – freed from binding physicality and loosened into the realm of remembrance.