Changing Roles of Museum Web Sites
They say time is relative, but never more so than when we consider the extraordinary changes that have taken place on-line - and specifically to museum Web sites - over the last ten years. A quick review of the WayBack Machine (http://www.archive.org/web/web.php) provides a startling reminder of how things have evolved in terms of design, technology, interaction, and purpose.
Starting out as relatively modest generation 0.1 Web sites, comprising a mix of brochureware, basic visitor information, and “tasters” from their collections, museum Web sites have now evolved into expansive, technically sophisticated, and often visually slick entities. The fact that hits on these Web sites now typically outstrip the numbers of visitors coming through the museums’ front doors, sometimes by as much as a factor of five (Vogel, 2006), has been a serious driver for organizations to engage more fully with the medium and with their demanding domestic and international on-line audiences.
This paper explores the response of four large-scale, US- and UK-based organizations as they address the many challenges in planning, developing, and deploying their new and improved Web sites, and shares a few of the sometimes painful lessons learned.
Status of Participating Institutions
As of publication, the museums represent the different cycles of a redesign initiative: the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (NGA) is in the discovery and strategy phase, the National Gallery, London, and The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) are in the development stage, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) site is live.
The NGA, working with the firm IconNicholson, began its redesign project with a discovery and strategy phase in 2008. NGA is now developing its content and information technology recommendations, as well as creative design directions and navigation strategies. The phase will finish with an executionable roadmap, sustainability strategy, and build schedule. The original NGA.gov site launched in 1997.
Fig 1: The home page of NGA’s Web site, http://www.nga.gov
At the time of writing, MoMA is weeks away from launching the redesign of MoMA.org, with a complete overhaul of the back- and front-end technology and a new design. The site originally launched in 1996, and the last redesign was conducted in 2002, with a visual update when the museum expansion opened in 2004. The current redesign project began in the fall of 2007, taking about 18 months from start to launch.
Figs 2 and 3: The home page of MoMA’s Web site before and after the redesign, http://www.moma.org
The National Gallery is moving into the final production stages in preparation for the launch of nationalgallery.org.uk in 2009. The new “National Gallery Online” represents a route and branch reworking of the Web site not seen since it was last updated in 2001 and is one of the most complex digital developments since 2005, when the museum launched ArtStart, its in-gallery interactive touch-screen system. The Web site will provide a streamlined information architecture (IA) and an elegant design, and will be fully content managed.
Figs 4 and 5: The home page of the National Gallery’s Web site before and after the redesign, http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/
SFMOMA launched its new site in November 2008. Prior to this, it had been ten years since sfmoma.org had been redesigned, and the recent redesign was a three-year process that involved the implementation of a content management system and a new design. Although the SFMOMA site is now live, the work is far from complete. SFMOMA’s Web team is currently fixing bugs, implementing features that were not completed for the launch, conducting a summative evaluation, and beginning the second phase of the project, redesigning the on-line store.
Figs 6 and 7: The home page of SFMOMA’s Web site before and after the redesign, http://www.sfmoma.org
Team Makeup
|
Project Lead |
Project Manager / Coordinator |
Content Producer |
Developer |
Editor |
Designer |
Admin support / Production Assistant |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
MoMA |
1 |
1 |
2 |
2 |
1 |
1 |
|
|
National Gallery |
1 |
1 |
2 |
1 |
.5 |
||
|
SFMOMA |
1 |
1 |
1 |
||||
|
NGA |
1 |
1 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
2 |
1 |
Table 1: Comparative table illustrating team sizes and project roles across each institution
|
Photo/ Audio Visual |
Education |
Curatorial/ Collection |
Marketing / Comms |
Develop- |
IT |
Retail / Pub |
Visitor Services |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
MoMA |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
|
National Gallery |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
|
SFMOMA |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
|
NGA |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Y |
Table 2: Comparative table showing the number of additional internal departments supporting the core development team
|
Flash Developer |
Writer/Editor |
Designer |
Developer |
CSS |
Technical Consultant |
Other |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
MoMA |
1 |
2 |
1 |
||||
|
National Gallery |
1 |
2 |
3 (consecu- |
||||
|
SFMOMA |
1 |
3 |
1 |
||||
|
NGA |
Table 3: Comparison of types and numbers of freelance supplementary staff required by each project
|
Research & Strategy |
Design Development |
Production and Implementation |
SEO consultants |
Assessment |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
MoMA |
For Office Use Only |
Cogapp, Omniture, ShiftSpace |
EyeTraffic |
||
|
National Gallery |
Bureau of Visual Affairs |
Box UK |
i-Level |
||
|
SFMOMA |
Hot Studio |
Hot Studio, Stamen Design |
Carbon Five Stamen Design |
Web Trends |
Institute for Learning Innovation |
|
NGA |
IconNicholson |
Table 4: Main contractors used
Why Should Museums Redesign Their Web Sites?
Museums, given their limited staff and resources, tend to postpone upgrading and redesigning their sites far longer than for-profit organizations. While some redesigns are triggered by specific events, such as the opening on a new building or the impetus of a new director, they are most often driven by a set of common needs and overarching goals. We identified six reasons why most museums, regardless of their size or discipline, embark upon redesign initiatives:
1. to strengthen infrastructure
Two core drivers are a failing infrastructure and changing technology. NGA, MoMA, the National Gallery, and SFMOMA all shared the same goal of wanting to move away from sites that were built in another Internet era with static pages to more dynamic sites driven by content management systems, or CMSs. The existing sites of all four institutions comprised mainly static HTML pages, with some database-driven portions, making updates tedious, time-consuming, and inefficient.
2. to improve the information architecture (IA)
Many museums find that they need to redesign when they outgrow their information architecture. When it becomes extremely difficult to add new sections or content to the Web site, and users have difficulty finding what they need, a redesign is in order. It is time to clean out the dusty corners, and restructure the site so that the information architecture is intuitive, clear, and designed around user needs.
Some symptoms of a failing IA are evident when:
- page layouts are inconsistent and confusing
- labeling and nomenclature are not clear or meaningful for users
- the Web site reflects the museum’s structure, rather than the users’ understanding of it
- content is difficult or impossible to find
3. to streamline workflow
Museums can make the greatest gains in workflow efficiency by adopting a CMS as part of a redesign. CMSs come in many different varieties, ranging from open-source to enterprise-level solutions. Empowering key staff members to input their own content with a CMS can greatly increase the quality and quantity of content an institution can publish to the Web. Being able to streamline workflow means that the Web team is able to focus on new projects and respond more quickly to emerging technologies, rather than spending all of their time on updating the site.
4. to help people find your Web site
The way people use the Web has radically changed since the first museum sites launched in the mid- to late-90s. Today, the majority of people find sites via external search engines, not by coming through the front door. A redesign offers a perfect opportunity to “pop the hood” of your site and optimize it for search engines. Changes can be made to your underlying code, metadata, page copy, links, and file names to ensure that your content is more discoverable by search engines, ranks higher in results, and is crawled more often.
5. to align the digital and physical brands
Given that many museums’ sites are sometimes over ten years old, institutions may find themselves with a site that is dated and looks nothing like the rest of their brand. Redesigns are often undertaken to bring the visual design up-to-date and into alignment with the character and mission of the institution. This realignment can also extend beyond the visual design to include functional enhancements to the site and new features.
6. to plan for sustainability and refreshment
Redesigning allows the opportunity to plan for long-term maintenance and refreshment. Since it could be another five to ten years before your next redesign, this is a critical time to ask yourself some key questions about your site’s future.
- How will your institution need to maintain the site after launch?
- What types of content and features will you need to plan for over the next several years?
By keeping these questions in mind as you build out your new site, you can ensure a more flexible system with easier maintenance.
Lessons Learned
Know your audience
The first step of any redesign effort should be learning who your users are. A redesign is a key opportunity to establish a framework for understanding your users and how you can best meet their needs. Building a strong connection between your on-line audience and your museum requires a clear and nuanced understanding of your users' motives and interests. In understanding the makeup of your audience, you can make informed decisions about designs and potential features, set institutional priorities, and build internal consensus.
NGA, after realizing that taking a purely demographic approach to understanding its audience offered only limited insights, decided to map its target demographics to attitudinal traits: that is, how people feel about NGA. These traits were identified through a series of surveys and focus groups which uncovered audience motivations for visiting nga.gov. Five attitudinal audience types, such as the “Culture Seeker” and “Local Advocate,” emerged from the research.
Fig 8: A Persona developed for the National Gallery of Art's Web site, http://www.nga.gov
It became clear during NGA’s research that these “attitudes,” rather than the demographic profile, played a greater role in users’ appreciation of nga.gov and their overall satisfaction with the experience.
SFMOMA learned, through an intensive user research project conducted with Hot Studio (Mitroff and Alcorn, 2007), that their users were not fully aware of SFMOMA’s range of on-site public programming, and that they wanted the museum to contextualize its collection more explicitly. To this end, the new SFMOMA Web site provides easy and seamless access to information about museum programs, and contextual information focusing on artworks and artists in the collection.
Early in their project, MoMA decided to feature different audience perspectives, such as filmgoers or educators, within the content organization of their new site. This direction was later confirmed through a series of focus groups and evaluations. What began as audience-specific portal pages gathering the content together for different audience types eventually took the approach of a “social bar” which permeates personalization features throughout the site and offers content suggestions based on a selected perspective.
Regardless of the size of your museum, there are many methodologies you can use to understand your audience and shape the big picture of your redesign goals. Tools such as focus groups, in-person surveys, on-line surveys, and site statistics can give you valuable insight into your users.
Know your brand
Evaluating the museum’s brand or overall identity, together with learning how that plays out in the institution’s existing on-line presence, was a key part of each of the four redesign projects described here.
The National Gallery, working with brand consultancy The Partners, expressed the institution’s brand with four key tonal values: Eminent, Elegant, Inspiring, and Inclusive. These tonal values, along with the goal of engaging the public in the experience of the art, became the drivers against which all aspects of the project were measured.
NGA found through their studies that the NGA brand was effectively deployed across a variety of media - except in the on-line environment, where they identified a need to maintain the museum’s existing quiet authority while making the voice stronger, richer, and more personally engaging to the on-line visitors.
Both SFMOMA and MoMA conducted studies about visitors’ perceptions of their museums. SFMOMA found that their visitors - while supportive of the museum and enthusiastic about the exhibitions - felt an absence of emotional engagement and connection. Through studies organized by the education and marketing departments, MoMA learned that while they had a strong reputation for having a first-class collection, it was only those people who had some kind of deeper connection with the museum - whether through experiencing an educational program or exploring the interpretive materials - who had a strong emotional attachment to it, regarding it as a place of inspiration and refuge. As an outcome in both cases, capturing the experience of the museum on their redesigned Web sites became more central than representing the physical place.
It’s About the People More Than the Technology
As with most projects within an organization, it’s about the people, not the technology. You can have the best systems on the market, but if the people working on the project don’t truly understand the problems you are trying to solve, your project will suffer. Three months into production, SFMOMA had to make the painful choice to change CMS vendors and start over because the vendor’s team had underestimated the complexity of their system. The vendor they ultimately chose had a small, local team that was so smart, creative, and assertive that their technology solution became secondary to how their developers approached the design challenges inherent in the Web site.
For MoMA, experience on a previous project ultimately led to the decision to build the new Web site primarily in-house. A few years earlier, MoMA had called a halt to an on-line calendar project because the consultants ultimately did not understand the complexities of representing the variety of the museum’s programs. The internal team, realizing that they were best positioned to understand the needs of the museum, decided to develop the project themselves. That project, which launched in 2006, laid the technical groundwork for the current Web site project and helped shape the museum’s approach to the redesign implementation, where the base site was built internally with additional components developed by key consultants.
In addition to the system implementation, the sustainability of a new Web site is defined by the people involved. For MoMA, this meant building a set of custom tools in-house so that the team would have true system ownership and would develop institutional knowledge about how to manage it. For SFMOMA, this meant literally working side-by-side with local vendors who could train their in-house team during the development process, and building an ongoing relationship with local vendors whom they could call upon as members of an extended team.
Everyone Has an Opinion
One of the most difficult things to manage during the course of any project, especially those that are heavily design-led, is the desire of a broad range of interested parties to express their own opinions. Sometimes this input can be extremely valuable and can produce highly creative solutions; however, it can also be poorly timed, random in nature, or unhelpful if not managed effectively.
Since the Web is a highly visual medium that all staff members use in their everyday lives, an unspoken assumption has developed that everyone represents a typical user, and therefore everyone’s thoughts and experiences constitute “user feedback.” The trick here is to separate the various stages of the design process into discrete packages that enable those managing the project to:
- Actively solicit input at the stages of design development where it will be most useful
- Set expectations, define and stick to agreed roles and responsibilities
- Manage the input of others in terms of feedback, comment, and criticism, while ensuring they don’t try to come up with the solution - that’s the designer’s job!
- Make effective use of audience research data when addressing issues of functionality, usability, or aesthetics.
Here are some high-level strategies, employed by all four organizations, which were found to be most effective in ensuring a positive design outcome:
Gather evidence: Know your target audiences and their behaviors, goals, and abilities. This will ensure design decisions can be made in the best interest of the user rather than the organization or individual staff members. This might take the form of on-line surveys, interviews, user tracking, statistical data, or focus groups.
Seek staff input early in the process: Internal stakeholder meetings are vital in establishing a shared understanding. Use the outcome of meetings, coupled with your user data, to refine your brief.
Make it personal: Terms like “user,” “visitor,” and “audience” are too vague when trying to determine if a design is going to work or not. Develop personas that represent the “real” people who will be using your site, and use these to test whether a solution is the right one.
Test for success: However short on time, budget, or resources you may be, it’s vital to test your design on others.
Keeping Momentum and Enthusiasm Is Crucial
So, you’ve defined your project, procured the funding, and assembled your team. Now the leadership aspect of the job really begins. The success of any project is never solely about the choice of technology or the elegance of your design: it rests on the people involved in its creation. Their combined skills, ability to work as a team, and ongoing enthusiasm and commitment to the project (through good times and bad) are essential for its overall success.
Here are some of the main leadership techniques that were employed at the National Gallery, MoMA, and SFMOMA:
- Defining and articulating a shared vision for the project, and then keeping everyone focused on it over the lifetime of the development (Kotter, 1996)
- Building a “balanced” project team that mixed skill sets, personalities, and traits (Belbin, 1993; Barr, L. and Barr, N., 1989)
- Avoiding micro-management and establishing a state of “distributed leadership” whereby all staff involved are encouraged to lead within their own areas
- Taking advantage of learning opportunities reflected throughout the life span of the project, and embedding that learning within the team (Argyris, 1999)
- Establishing a sense of urgency by setting mini-deadlines to focus the team, and recognizing successful completion of phases (Kotter, 1996)
- Providing some “quick wins,” and recognizing what has been accomplished along the way.
As it could be months, perhaps even years, before you cross the finish line for your project, learning to keep yourself and your team focused and motivated will be vital for success. If you treat a Web site redesign as something akin to running a series of back-to-back marathons, you begin to understand the kind of commitment required on everyone’s part in order to reach your end goal.
Specify, Specify, Specify
Developing specifications for your new site is an extremely important - and often painful - part of the process. It represents the training sessions before you run the first marathon. Whether you develop all of your specifications in-house, or rely on external consultants to guide you through the process, doing as much up-front planning as possible is critical. From auditing all of your existing assets and content to developing the metadata schemas to accompany that content, the more you can document and specify, the easier your implementation will be.
Whether you choose to develop your specifications in-house or work with outside consultants is determined by a combination of factors, including your budget, timeline, the size and experience of your internal team, and the culture of your organization.
MoMA found that providing their consultants with preliminary specifications and having them, in turn, develop the final detailed specifications, while adding a bit more to the expense, was a useful technique in determining if there were any misunderstandings or areas of confusion, and ensured that both sides had thought through and explored any major issues.
SFMOMA chose to develop all of the specifications in-house and spent several months developing a suite of extremely detailed documentation ranging from an XML schema to an extensive content inventory.
The National Gallery also developed their specifications solely in-house, in large part due to budget restrictions, but in retrospect they would have benefited from a specialist consultant working as a bridge between the internal team and the CMS vendor. The most significant challenges have all arisen from gaps or ambiguity in the specifications. This, coupled with an underestimation by the vendor of the complexities involved in moving large amounts of static content to a dynamic system, has significantly impacted on the overall timeline for the development.
At the outset of their project, NGA established a vendor procurement strategy that would allow them a fast and smooth transition from Request for Proposal (RFP) to signed contract. They spent several months developing an extremely detailed RFP, complete with deliverables and background materials. This RFP essentially transitioned smoothly into a contract, and allowed them to move from vendor selection to contract signing in less than a month’s time.
Evaluate All Technology Options to Find the Best Fit
When shifting from static, brochureware Web sites to dynamic, database-driven ones, the choice of back-end technology becomes a key component to the success and longevity of the Web site. Each of the museums that have reached or passed the development phase of their projects spent significant time researching different CMSs, including existing, off-the-shelf solutions, open-source software, and custom solutions.
NGA is currently examining mid-tier open-source and commercial off-the-shelf CMS solutions that will integrate with a new calendar, search feature, and visit planning system, so that the main Web site content and the calendar can be updated at the same time via the CMS.
For SFMOMA, because their IT department had limited staff and resources and there were no plans to expand their Web team, one of their main requirements was to use an existing CMS from a company that could provide them with ongoing support. After changing initial vendors, they ended up with a solution built on open-source technologies but containing all the features of an enterprise-ready CMS, and included an annual support contract with the vendor.
MoMA, on the other hand, decided to build the specific required components themselves on a Ruby on Rails open-source platform. While the MoMA Web team also was not expanding, the existing staff had the knowledge needed to take this approach, and flexibility and customizability were high priorities when analyzing the different possible solutions. Outside consultants provided both the on-line collection section and the “social bar” components to the site.
The National Gallery decided early on in the procurement process to select a CMS vendor who would partner closely with them, in order to augment the internal team’s experience and skills. The system itself had to be cost effective, due to the fixed procurement budget, and sustainable, with a lifespan of three to four years. With limited in-house programming resources, they required a mid-range off-the-shelf solution that the vendor could customize. An open-source solution was deemed potentially too difficult to support in the long term. However, most importantly, like NGA and SFMOMA, they wanted a partner to aid them throughout the whole process.
While there is not one solution that works for all museums, the lesson learned from these institutions is to look at your existing team and resources carefully and think about how the different technological solutions support or integrate with them. Prioritize what is required and look at the tools and consultants that best meet those priorities. Avoid the trap of trying to fit your project to a solution, and look instead for the solution that best fits your project. You’ll have to live with the outcome for a long time, so think through the options carefully!
Be Flexible and Realistic
When you first start a major redesign project, throw open the doors and consider all ideas, big and small. But at some point, the realities of budget, staffing, and scheduling hit, and you need to balance and prioritize the wishes and dreams.
SFMOMA worked with outside consultants who led them through a formal feature prioritization workshop as part of the strategy phase. They gathered together their stakeholder team and went through every potential feature on the table, prioritizing features and functionality based on institutional needs, user needs, and technical feasibility. They then ranked features in a matrix, and used this matrix to develop their requirements and project phases. While some features were pushed into phases two and three, other features - while worthy and valid - were dropped.
Both MoMA and the National Gallery undertook similar exercises, which were managed by the internal Digital and New Media teams. The National Gallery, after carrying out their stakeholder meetings, assembled a cross-departmental team to brainstorm ideas and then reviewed them in light of their user personas. Creative suggestions were rated to identify which ideas were most suitable for each persona while doing the least “harm” to others. This methodology was adapted from one demonstrated by Neilsen Norman Group (http://www.nngroup.com); it was felt to be a valuable tool when attempting to balance the organization's aspirations, creative ideas, and user needs.
While SFMOMA had outside consultants lead them through the process, both MoMA and the National Gallery did this internally using the following steps:
- identifying the internal stakeholders
- gathering a list of all the ideas that people came up with
- sifting through those ideas, removing overlap
- prioritizing based on the overall goals of the museum and the redesign project
The objective is to come up with a cohesive vision for the Web site and the project rather than a constellation of ideas. This approach can be applied to museums both large and small. The ultimate goal is to ensure that you end up with a solid foundation on which to develop your ideas over a longer timeframe. You can’t do everything at once, but you want to ensure that you avoid limiting your options by your choice of CMS, structure, or design. And be aware that no matter how realistic and well-defined your project is, something will always arise to cause scope creep or a necessary shift. The need to be flexible and realistic while keeping the end goal in focus is one of the biggest challenges of a redesign project. The only thing you can be sure of going into the project is that you will discover something during the process that you didn’t anticipate when you began.
Deadlines Are Good
Despite extensive planning and preparation, all four redesign projects have had their project schedules shift at least once. In the case of SFMOMA, they decided to change their CMS vendors midway through the project, MoMA had to rework some of the design and structure of their site to accommodate a change in the overall museum branding approach and the introduction of a new marketing advisory group. The National Gallery had to spend more time addressing technical issues in order to integrate their Web site CMS with their collection management system. NGA lengthened their schedule to allow for more creative design development.
These types of delay are not atypical when undertaking such complex projects, and it’s important to be flexible and adapt to changes during the course of any development. However, it is still vital to ensure deadlines are defined, agreed upon, achievable, and preferably “real.” Having a “real” deadline forces you to make choices and get the project done. Deadlines also provide for all involved a sense of urgency that is necessary for such an ambitious undertaking. Where possible, it’s beneficial to establish a number of mini-deadlines (that you don’t let slip along the way), as they give a sense of progress toward your end point, and ensure that the final launch date is realistic. Many different factors can drive an end date. For example, SFMOMA’s relaunch was tied to the opening of a major exhibition for which the Web was a key component.
In order to collaborate and communicate as effectively as possible during the course of the project, all four of our organizations made as much use as possible of sharing, tracking, and communication tools such as project wikis, bug trackers, and collaborative workspaces. These tools were also helpful in mitigating the concept of “museum time” as much as possible. To safeguard your relationship with your vendor, it may be important to introduce them to this concept early on. “Museum time” is the time it takes an organization to approve something and turn it around. Many vendors are used to accelerated schedules and quick feedback, but most museums just can’t move that quickly due to their discursive decision-making, complex approval processes, and need to establish buy-in. Feedback for a deliverable may take two weeks when the vendor is used to two days. If this is the case, you should determine the budget implications for a longer project schedule as a result of extended turn-around times. Setting up parallel rather than iterative deliverables may also be useful so that “museum time” does not derail your project.
The Launch Is the Beginning, Not the End
The paint never dries on pixels, and that’s both a blessing and a curse. Because of this, you can choose to deploy additional features post-launch, and iterate new functionalities as you develop them. This is a blessing for under-staffed and under-resourced museum teams in that you can phase in features over time, but it’s also a curse in that when we tell our users or colleagues that something is “coming soon,” we really are expected to deliver.
Unless you have the luxury of doubling your in-house resources and securing funding for everything in one fiscal year, don’t try to do everything at once. Break your project into pieces, and then budget for them accordingly. MoMA, SFMOMA, NGA, and the National Gallery identified the “must-have” features for launch, and then documented which features would be rolled out later. Formally documenting which feature goes into which phase allows you to factor in future developments and to be clear about your priorities. It also reminds staff that version 1.0 is not the end. SFMOMA launched their Web site with over 100 open bugs, some 30 incomplete features, and the knowledge that they had two more phases ahead.
Despite its inherently unfinished nature, deploying a tangible new site will go a long way to boosting team morale and building confidence within the organization. However, be prepared for the inevitable feedback and requests for even more features and new “toys”: when people in your museum see it, they will think of all sorts of other things you could add!
Be Ready to Evaluate and Respond to Feedback
When your new Web site goes live, you will become painfully aware of what is and is not working. Despite your best intentions to design a user-centered Web site, it’s inevitable to discover some issues post-launch. Because the Web site is such a highly visible and public tool, users and staff will not hold back in telling you what they think.
The SFMOMA team was confronted with the reality of this when issues with their navigation came to light. Complaints to the Web master and the museum’s front-line staff alerted the team to the fact that people were struggling to find the museum’s opening hours and that there were missing links to key top-level pages. This problem was confirmed when they analyzed the traffic statistics and reviewed their log files. The solution: a quick modification to the navigation and the addition of the opening hours to the footer of every page. E-mails about this problem decreased to zero, searches for hours dropped by 79%, and traffic to the top-level pages via the navigation increased by 50%.
Alongside user feedback, formal evaluations can be critical in uncovering issues. It’s a myth that you need a large budget to conduct an evaluation. Inexpensive on-line survey tools, free services such as Google Analytics, and interviews with users can all be used to assess your site. At the time of writing, SFMOMA is conducting a summative evaluation through on-line surveys and user interviews.
Look Beyond Museums
It would be disingenuous to deny that museum Web sites are competing with all forms of on-line cultural engagement. To be competitive and relevant within this arena, it’s vital that we look for inspiration and innovation as widely as possible. There are pertinent lessons to be learned from sites as diverse as NetFlix (http://www.netflix.com) and immersive 3D environments. The emergence of on-line communities and networks like Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) and Twitter (http://twitter.com) also affords us opportunities to build loyalty beyond our own Web sites.
A Web site redesign can be greatly enhanced by a bit of “horizon scanning” as early on in the process as possible. To aid in this, The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a useful resource for following trends (http://www.pewinternet.org).
Conclusion
From the need to enhance the on-line visitor experience to streamlining the infrastructures, there are many reasons to undertake a Web site redesign project. No matter which combinations of factors conspire to initiate the project, they all represent a significant opportunity to instigate change, whether personal, team based, or organizational.
This paper, focusing on the experiences of four leading institutions, has highlighted a perhaps surprising number of similarities between their projects, regardless of the specific technologies they used, the type of CMSs they ultimately selected, or the size and make-up of their teams. Reviewing the lessons learned illustrates that there are no absolute rights or wrongs when attempting to develop a new Web site for a museum. They do, however, offer valuable insight into some potentially winning formulas. Reflecting on these projects has shown that even the best-laid plans often need to be revised once projects are up and running.
In conclusion, whether you are in the discovery phase or weeks away from launch, there are real opportunities to benefit from the experiences of those that have gone before. It’s reassuring to know that you are not alone in the challenges faced in planning, developing, and deploying your new Web site.
References
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Belbin, M.R. (1993). Team Roles at Work. Oxford: Elsevier.
Kotter, J.P. (1996). Leading Change. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Mitroff, D., and K. Alcorn. Do You Know Who Your Users Are? The Role of Research in Redesigning. sfmoma.org. In D. Bearman and J. Trant (eds.) Museums and the Web 2007: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics, 2007. Last updated December 14, 2008. Cconsulted January 26, 2009. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/mitroff/mitroff.html
Vogel, C. (2006). “3 Out of 4 Visitors to the Met Never Make It to the Front Door”. New York Times. Published March 29, 2006. Consulted February 9, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/arts/artsspecial/29web.html?_r=2&scp=16&sq=museum%20Web site%20vogel%202006&st=cse
