A Review of the New Whitney Website

In recent days and weeks, amongst the museum twitterati, I have been seeing discussion about the latest and greatest web site for the Whitney Museum of American Art in NYC.  I was intrigued initially, as there were closed sessions and people were given early previews and sneak peaks.  It would have passed me by, but for the fact that @MuseumMarketing made a quick comment regarding the site today and my interest was re-piqued.  I decided to have a peruse of the new site and when I got there I was completely shocked by what I saw, though at the same time not totally disconcerted as there were positives to be taken from the upgrade to this well-respected institution’s web site.

Initial Impressions

Having not seen any previous versions of the site, and archive.org not having any working versions, I have no means of suitable comparison with past iterations, but in contrast to web standards at large, best practices and other museum web sites currently online I was flawed.  In fact, the compulsive shock I feel is so jaw-dropping I am not even sure where to begin.  It’s as if they asked junior-weight designer and programmer to slap something together, and that they did so in isolation of any pre-existing experience and knowledge.

The following are some of the points I listed during a wander around the web site and are by no means exhaustive but obviously the most glaring:

Layout & Colour Scheme

The layout alone is bland with only 2 or 3 different colors used, it lacks serious hierarchy in style and content and has little or no proper visual cues, simply floating on a white background and making the content much harder to read.  The header is a jumbled mess, with no clear delineation or purpose, and there is no clear global navigation at the top of the page with only, in my view, ill-selected links.  The logo itself is rough, let’s call it arty, and flip flops from primary to secondary page, changing in size and style as you go rather than remaining in the same solid, consistent state and position, top left, throughout.

The fact that the overall colour scheme changes from day to night (from white to black) at 6pm NYC time, at best warrants no merit and (A) only serves to confuse, (B) wastes resources, (C) provides NO value to site visitors, and (D) makes the site harder to read with a dark background.  It kind of reminds me of the ‘Paint It Black’ and ‘Simply Red’ options on Last.fm.  However, there at least the user has a choice in the inflicted result.  On the Whitney site, if nothing else the practice merely serves to lengthen development time.

As for the color scheme, as previously mentioned, it is bland and it looks like ZERO effort has been put into it. Although it mirrors the scheme of the Cutline Wordpress theme, as used on this blog, at the moment of typing, I really don’t like it, especially given that we are talking about an art institution and not a blog.  The highlight green is darker and much closer to the black, so harder to differentiate, which doesn’t quite help the fact that most text seems to be in the same style, size and weight.

The visual cues of different background colors and lines to help break up sections and define the content and content groups are nowhere to be seen, making the site much harder to read.  There is something to be said for hierarchy, clear delineation and standardized formats, as it creates a symmetry that the eye can follows more easily.

Navigation

In terms of the actual navigation, there is little rhyme or reason. It is as if the designer lumped every link they could think of that a visitor might want to visit and shoved them in one place. For what reason do ‘Collect’ and ‘Share’ alone happen to take pride of place in the header compared to any of the other links?  And how perverse the little ‘collect’ and associated spot at the bottom of every page.  And why are ‘About’ and ‘Contact’ relegated to the footer, which lacks a decent list of links, the mainstay of any footer for a large site these days.

In general the navigation links lack real structure, coherence and overall sense, and when visitors first hit the site this makes their path and choices much harder.  Surely the navigation and associated links and their position should have been (A) determined by prior analytics and knowledge of user journeys through the site, and (B) by a determination to steer people towards specific cool and new functionality in an obvious fashion, of which the ‘Collect’ is one but isn’t well highlighted.  First and foremost, a redesign should make it easier for web site visitors to reach the info they are actually looking to find, not harder as this new site navigation does.

The lack of a breadcrumb and any sense of clear sections and the available content within them at a glance also makes the depth and breadth of the site unfathomable and doesn’t encourage site visitors to surf around much at all.  Whole worlds of new content are squirreled away and appear only as you visit new sections and only if you notice the changes in the top of the left-hand menu.

Occasionally, it seems, a random tag cloud appears from nowhere, rolled out for some kind of effect, and works, but leaves you thinking, why just chuck it there and why not elsewhere on other pages too? Surely with the right mix of decent navigation points it would make the entire site much more usable and easier to navigate.

Reaching the 404 error page is also a whole other story.  For content not found, the header, left-hand menu and footer links, squidged with the minimal content and the ‘collect’ spot provide for an interesting view. They do not even begin to proactively get the site visitor out of a dead-end and onto pages with some of the most attractive content on the site.  If anything the 404 should act more like a landing page or even the home page.  With an upgrade to the site, and the high possibility that links from Google and elsewhere will be broken, it is critical that the 404 pages or actual redirects are correct and in place.

Interface Elements

As if the issues with navigation and design weren’t bad enough the UI chosen for the interface elements are even more muddled.  For one, some links don’t even look like links but rather text with 1 pixel wide borders, which I suppose makes them buttons, but then why not use button-styled graphics?  The problem is that these link styles then clash with tabs and other elements with the exact same styling.

Secondly, icons don’t follow standard-accepted styles, so the icons, randomly placed, look just like that rather than, for example, a link to some iCal .ics file that happens to be next to the title or an exhibition.  The perennial hover/pop-up that follows you everywhere explaining every last detail is of course useful but underlines the fact that some much of the site doesn’t make immediate sense and needs to be consistently explained to users.

Beyond this, there is a lack of consistency. One minute a download link includes a downward arrow, and the next it does not.  Images appended with the term ‘Watch this’ and a video camera, plus a ‘Whitney’ video watermark merely lead you to a page where you can watch the video plus further info.  Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t even auto-play, so you have to click again, which is a tad annoying.  There is plenty of usability research that indicates that it is better to have less clicks for a user when trying to navigate through your site to the desired destination.  Moreover these video pages are pretty much dead-ends which lead you to no further or realted content and no link to take you back to where you started.

The EXHIBITION image galleries on the home page are another odd interface design. The controls look like two opposing play buttons sandwiching a pause button, which itself is invoked when using the next and previous buttons forcing you to un-pause it.  It would be likely more handy if you had a pager that auto-played with the position of the current slide highlighted.  The rotating highlight of the links underneath is useful, though when clicked takes you to  the content landing page for that exhibit rather than rotating the image to that spot.  With so many standardised solutions out there providing both functioning solutions and examples for interfaces that web users are used to, it amazes me they built something that flies in the face of accepted practices.

Graceful Degradation & Accessibility

Switching off Javascript in the browser causes some functionality on the site to break altogether, rendering portions of the site useless, whilst the navigation points for them remain, which is confusing.  Making content work with JS enabled or disabled isn’t an impossibility, but of course requires extra work, and in the end covers all bases.  More crucially with the JS-enabled search button JS fade in and out functionality, with JS disabled the search box doesn’t work at all, which to my mind is a critical flaw.  Such basic functionality shouldn’t be linked to the need for Script Access, which could either be disabled in browser or disabled for other reasons such as the JS file not downloading.

With CSS disabled the site on many pages is still pretty legible, though of course even this could be improved by the proper user of markup language rather than enclosing most content in divs rather than list items, paragraphs and whatever else.  Some might say this mere nitpicking, but in reality it shows the underbelly of a well polished web site that has benefited from a slow and considered process and which has been matured and optimised to the maximum, and in the long run it benefits by enhancing the view of the site from a Search Engines perspective.  SEO is probably the last thing on their mind by any web developer worth their weight in gold should be thinking about such things from the get-go.

Site Content

The best thing about the site is the available content, and it is a shame that it has been presented in such a poor and un-user-friendly fashion.  I applaud the Whitney for really tapping into a bunch of different options from Pictures, to Video, to Audio and onto RSS and other technologies.  This is the currency of their institution and they need to flaunt it.  They also note that site users and interested parties come in all shapes and sizes, from young to old, and having specific sections for different age groups is great.  That being said I feel like they could have made more effort with designing a site that was more of a special place for kids.

Games and microsites are the kinds of things kids love and other institutions, the Tate in London for example, do a great job of enticing kids to learn about them and about Art as a whole, which I suppose is a collective responsibility for institutions worldwide.  Posting such things online is a great way to co-opt adults in the teaching process as parents love to share with their kids. Plus, it helps to get them in and learning early so that your museum can have a special place in their hearts.  Content needs to be intriguing as well as fun and educational for kids, and right now there is nothing quite like that on the site.

On A Positive Note & By Way of Conclusion

I could go on and on, though I don’t wish to berate the museum and highlight every flaw, but I think there are clear lessons to be learned, and despite many of the essentially negative things I have said about the new whitney.org web site, it has positives to. One for example, is the is the actual content itself and the fact that this base offers a good spring board to better things .  Web sites exist that are likely far worse than the new whitney.org, the Saatchi Gallery, London site still shocks me with its 1996 feel every time I visit, but on the flip side there are many shining examples, the Indianapolis Museum of Art for one and even London’s Tate Gallery.

The new website doesn’t quite do the Whitney justice and seems to have passed by the leaps and bounds in which the web has come on the last few years in terms of functionality, usability, user engagement and social context, which, to my mind, is a real shame.  One of my colleagues at Stink Digital asked why I care so much about the site design, having verbalised my sentiment most of the day. I explained that obviously design and usability were things I cared a lot about, but when tied up with other real passions such as art, it really fired me up. I hope others might learn, if not the Whitney, from things I have written here.

The cultural sector has a hard enough time selling itself to the public, so the industry and organisations in particular barely need to make life any harder.  Another friend of mine remarked it had been 20 years since he was last at the Whitney, and I thought to myself, if the web site is the kind of welcome he gets online, then he might be less encouraged to step over the threshold in person. That would be the worst of all possible outcomes.  The site itself really needs to be designed to wet the appetite of potential visitors, to provide a mouth-watering experience and encourage people to get their bums off seats.

I am sure the site, with time, can be improved, and features added and navigation updated. A web site has to start somewhere, but unless there is a real sea change, I personally feel like this site is going to be one that acts as if it is ‘living beyond its means.’