It was one year ago today that we launched the current version of IMAmuseum.org. We are admittedly still proud of our website as it took a large group of IMA staff six months of dedicated work to create what you see today. In a blog post, we introduced the world to the new set of features of the site. Today, we thought we would take a brief look back at those features and see what worked and what needed a little adjusting throughout the year.

Front page of IMAmuseum.org as seen on 2/1/2011.

With the exception of changing images in the blocks, the front page has seen virtually no changes during the last year. We originally toyed around with the idea of making the main banner image somewhat dynamic, with rotating images, but eventually opted to let it remain static until a true need arises.

The interactive calendar on IMAmuseum.org.

The calendar is among the most novel features of the website, providing a simple “month-at-a-glance” interface. This has seen little change in its first year as well. Museum calendars can be littered with complication, and we like to think this clean approach brings a sense of clarity to users.

The IMAmuseum.org collection search showing advanced options.

Another feature that has held up fairly well is the collection search. You can see the set of advanced search options in the screenshot above. While looking through search logs, we can see that most users don’t seem to use the “Department”, “Materials”, or “Object type” search filters. We have received a lot of positive feedback and seen moderate use of the slider tool for accession and creation date though.

Live search results when searching for "superbowl".

The Apple-style live search, sprinkled with a little bit of administrator search boosting, has proven extremely useful. We watch our website analytics heavily and try to understand what users are really searching for based on their terms. Using this information, we can boost specific content for specific search keywords. Above, you can quickly find our losing Super Bowl bet from last year. (Be sure to follow this year’s bet as well).

Three major exhibition sites created within IMAmuseum.org in the last year.

We decided that we would produce all major exhibition sites (commonly called microsites) under the IMAmuseum.org umbrella once we launched this new site.  The site was designed in such a way that dramatically different designs could be “sandwiched” between the header and footer. This can especially be seen in the new and visually impacting Thornton Dial exhibition site.

The IMAmuseum.org shopping cart.

I’ll admit. Up until this point I have been a little self-congratulatory. When it comes to the eCommerce features of the IMA website though, we have had to do a fair amount of updating and improving. I don’t know that any of us quite expected the amount of work behind running, maintaining, and supporting an online store. We also took quite a risk by providing the ability to purchase memberships, retail, tickets, and give donations within a single cart system. Here are some of the lessons learned from the first year:

• Applying membership discounts online is hard! We are still actively trying to make improvements to ensure members can quickly and easily log on to the site and have their account aware of their benefits. Building a system that is capable of respecting the many nuances of our specific membership rules is also a continuous effort.
• Users do not like to leave the site to pay. When we originally launched the site, all payments were made through Google Checkout, which involved the user leaving the IMA website to pay and then being redirected back to the IMA site. While we had good reasons for using this at the time, the frustration experienced by users did not account for those. We have since switched to a payment provider which allows users to checkout completely without ever leaving the website. Since this change, we have seen a huge decrease in the number of shopping carts abandoned.
• Have support processes in place. The software development team didn’t quite realize that they would be acting in a custom support role. While many of the features of the website “run themselves”, an eCommerce operation definitely requires the offline touch as well. We are just now getting formal support chains in place for online customers that need assistance with online purchases. This isn’t to say there wasn’t anyone to help in the last year. It was just a matter of bouncing around e-mail and involving too many people.

Let us know if there are more ways we can improve our site in order to better serve the needs of the online visitor.

To coincide with the opening of 100 Acres, we are releasing a greatly enhanced mobile version of our site, with more content accessible from mobile phones. Anyone with a modern phone using Webkit (iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, etc.) can explore the IMA online by visiting http://www.imamuseum.org right from their device.

The cool thing is, our website automatically detects if you are on a mobile phone,  and you will be sent to the mobile version of the site. You’ll have quick access to upcoming events and general visitor information (hours, directions). You can also check out our twitter, facebook, flickr, and videos.

We’re excited to also release a rich experience in the 100 Acres section of the mobile site. In order to provide trail maps we turned to OpenStreetMap, which we like to describe as the “Wikipedia of maps”. Anyone can contribute and edit map data. You can draw new features directly on maps or upload GPS trails from a device. On our site you can toggle between trail maps provided by OpenStreetMaps or satellite imagery provided by Google. The map is also aware of your geolocation, and will place a blue dot exactly where you are in the park.

OpenStreetMap: The "Wikipedia of maps".

We are going to provide a rich mix of art and nature tour stops to give visitors access to videos, photos and text for specific locations in the park. We plan on updating nature stops to highlight when certain plants are in bloom and to show you where we see some of our furry friends.

100 Acres mobile landing page.

Toggle between satellite and trail maps.

Interactive tour stops for works of art and nature.

In the series of screen shots below you can see how to bookmark the IMA mobile web site on an iPhone to make it look and feel like a native application.

Press the "+" to add the site to your home screen.

Select "Add to Home Screen"

The site now acts like an app.

Mobile view of http://www.imamuseum.org

Don’t forget to take some time to look up from your phones when in 100 Acres!

Auto-rotate proved more confusing than anything else

Yes, the image above is supposed to be confusing. It’s one of the lessons learned from collecting feedback and tracking events on the TAP iPod tour for Sacred Spain. Patrons didn’t quite realize that as they interacted with the tour, we were secretly shooting off messages to a server.  We tracked everything from incorrect codes to device rotations.  All in all we collected over a quarter million events.  Almost half of those events were rotations of the application layout.  We heard back from people that they were “catching up with the rotations”.  Based on this we have decided to flat remove any rotation from the next tour. Everything will be in portrait mode with the exception of video playback.

Here’s a few more simple stats I pulled.

2,788 times TAP was launched during the Sacred Spain exhibition.

90,984 tour stops visited.

3,051 incorrect codes entered.

Interested in more?  Here’s a dump of the log file.

I invite you to experience the next TAP tour of our upcoming exhibition, Tara Donovan: Untitled.

Explore Tara Donovan: Untitled using the next TAP tour from the IMA

]]> http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/03/25/tap-analytics/feed/ 0 Auto-rotate overload Splash screen for TAP Tara Donovan: Untitled http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/02/09/whats-in-a-web-site-collections-search/ http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/2010/02/09/whats-in-a-web-site-collections-search/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:34:13 +0000 Charlie http://www.imamuseum.org/blog/?p=10866 IMA web site is live, we want to take time to introduce you to some new features over the next few weeks. First up, collections search.]]> Now that the new IMA web site is live, we want to take time to introduce you to some new features over the next few weeks.  Rob gave a behind the scenes look at many of these features last week, but we’ll be going into more detail.

First up, collections search.

Search is available on every page on the site.

We created rich menus for the navigation of the website.  Under the “Art” menu item you’ll find we’ve added a collections search box.  This makes the collections available from every single page on the website.

Overview of the collections search page.

Upon visiting the collections search page itself, you’ll be presented with a random selection of works of art that are currently on view in the galleries.

Hovering a result gives detailed information.

In the picture above, I did a search for “landscape“. Hovering the results presents you with some more information and options for each work. You can quickly see if the work is currently on view and how relevant it is to your search. You can also click the magnifying glass to zoom the image or click on several other places to visit the works web page.

We're talking serious zoom.

Results can be filtered by creator.

We can see from search logs that most people are actually searching by artist names. In response to this we have added the ability to filter your search results by creator. In the screenshot above I have filtered my “landscape” search to only show works by John Ottis Adams.

User supplied tags make works easier to find.

Sometimes you might be looking for a work in a non-standard way. User-supplied tags can make it easier to find works that may not have the words in the tombstone that you are looking for. Case in point: a recent Super Bowl bet in which we now have to lend a specific work to the New Orleans Museum of Art.

You can select custom creation date ranges.

Finally we wanted to make it easy to search works by their creation and accession dates. We added some simple sliders to the advanced section of the form that let you do exactly this. In the example above I am viewing works from our Asian department that were created during the Edo period. You can ask some reason specific questions using the search. In the example below I am looking for paintings acquired since the beginning of 2009.

You can also select custom accession date ranges.

We always love feedback, good or bad. Let us know what works and what doesn’t.

Below is the list of who you see in order of appearance.

• 
  Ed
• 
  Matt
• 
  Charlie
• 
  Kris

Indianapolis Museum of Art Garden, Pony Bridge; contributed by Terry.Tyson

I’m not the only one captured by the seasons, as shown by the IMA Flickr Group.  As of this writing we have over 200 members and we are pushing dangerously close to 2000 images!  It’s wonderful to see the many vantage points brought together to a single point on the web.

Here’s a few photos I captured three years ago shortly after starting at the IMA.  They are not altered in any way.  I always revel in these photos and tell people about them.  So I am taking my opportunity now to share them with you.

Grab the extinguisher. This tree's on fire!

Check out the latest additions to the Flickr group and please join us by sharing your fall photos as well.

I’m going to let the images do most the talking, but please note that none of the design or content is completely finalized below.

Monsters vs. Aliens © Dreamworks Animation

I’m an avid NPR listener and I was intrigued by a segment a few weeks back that discussed the resurgence of 3D in the movie theater. The Dreamworks film, Monsters vs. Aliens, saw a $58 million opening weekend of which $24 million was from 3D screens (ref). Over 40% of the film’s revenue came from less than 10% of the screens. When 3D glasses first hit the big screen it was a less than desirable experience.  The alignment was less than par and many movie goers would leave feeling queasy. This is a far cry from the experience of today. People are more than willing to pay extra for the immersion and they will have many more chances in the near future.

“….G-Force on July 24, Final Destination: Death Trip 3-D on August 14, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on September 18, the reworking of Toy Story in the 3-D format October 2, Astro Boy on October 23, Disney’s A Christmas Carol on November 6, Planet 51 for Thanksgiving and, finally, James Cameron’s long-awaited Avatar.” – from Slashfilm

Another 3D project caught my eye yesterday as well. A Google employee has leveraged his 20% time by creating a 3D video viewer for YouTube. You can see one view in the video below. Click the video and visit it on YouTube to see a dropdown of many different 3D option (e.g. anaglyph red/blue).

Artists have been capitalizing on perception for thousands of years, so I set out to find examples in our collection.  My esteemed colleague, Ed, pointed me to a technique called Trompe-l’œil (French for “trick the eye”). A quick search of the collections yielded some interesting results.

Still Life by Edwaert Colyer demonstrating Trompe-l'œil

Still Life demonstrates a perceived 3D scene from a 2D work and conversely we have 3D works that appear flat from the initial vantage point. Most notable is Robert Irwin’s, Untitled, which is anything but flat.

Untitled by Robert Irwin

Finally, a shout out to the sidewalk chalk artists.

World by Julian Beever

Do you have any favorites that “trick the eye”?

(On a tangent, NPR had a similar segment discussing the upcoming series of movies based on board games. Greatly looking forward to Candyland.)

A view of a user dashboard

Each user has a customizable dashboard with a personalized view into their projects and activity.  I might be considered an average user with 27 projects.  Some users have more than 100! The project order is customizable so you have quick access to your most frequent projects.

The project listing widget on the dashboard.

Below is a peek inside a project.  Each project can enable and disable features such as file sharing, an image gallery, tasks, etc.. You can also see recent activity on just the project you are viewing.

A view inside a project.

We wanted a way to engage users in the system and promote fast adoption.  Our solution was a built in gaming module. Users earn a small amount of points for every action they perform in Athena. — This feature can be turned off with the flick of a switch for those without a sense of joy in life. — As users earn more points they unlock new features. The features include themes and helpful widgets for their dashboard (e.g. a todo list).  Additionally, users are assigned a certain rank based on their points. Users must work hard to be promoted from “Newbie” to “Tom Brady” to “Intern” and so on.

An elite Athena user am I.

Below you can see an example of when a user earns a new feature.

You earned a new level.

Additional motivation is given by a ranking dashboard widget. Users can see other users right around them and track how to they move relative to others.

I will get you Daniel.

In the spirit of transparency, here is a few of the statistics we monitor. Of interest is that we have more external users than IMA staff users. Any staff member can invite any e-mail address to a project.  That external user gets their own dashboard and rank. In just 18 months we have accumulated over 11,000 files weighing in at 22GB of office documents. All these documents are indexed and their contents are searchable, so they are actually very easy to locate.

Athena statistics so far.

Moving ahead we would be interested in releasing Athena for others to use. It’s always a work in progress. We’re also keeping our eye out for better solutions that could come along.

Trying to keep up-to-date with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. is not a new problem.  There are entire desktop applications dedicated to aggregating this content for your consumption. Still I find myself drowned by the noise. It would be optimistic to say that a quarter of this social stream directly interests me. Additionally this content is decoupled from other forms of communication (i.e. SMS / e-mail).  These are some of the reasons why I am excited about the prospects of Google Wave.

Last week Google announced what can best be described as a communications platform.  It mixes traditional e-mail with a slew of modern features.  Real-time collaborative editing, event planning, and a game of chess are just a few of the tasks you can carry out from within the platform. — Anyone used SubEthaEdit? — The engineers developed Wave by asking themselves what e-mail would look like if it were invented today. The result is e-mail on steroids.

Where Facebook presents a view of the conversations from your hundreds of contacts, Wave focuses on conversations that you are directly involved with. You will even be able to branch new (private) conversations with whomever you wish. Conversations can be played back so late-comers can see how they evolved. How many times have you received a forward with broken fragments of conversation and you are supposed to understand all the context around it? No more my friends!

Concurrent rich-text editing in Wave

Much of Wave will be embeddable as well.  An example was shown of blog authoring from Wave.  Edits are published in real-time.  Comments on the blog are also pushed back to the wave interface in real-time. A blog author could immediately start up a conversation with a complete stranger who posts a comment on their article if they both happen to be online at the same time.

You are not bound to Google's Wave.

Another interesting note is that Google Wave is indeed a platform. An entire protocol is being developed so anyone can host their own Wave Server. Entire conversation can be held without leaving your intranet. Information only leaves your Wave host when outsiders are brought into the conversation. Still, parts of the wave that occur internally will stay internal. This platform also means we won’t be forced to consume ads down the road and we truly own the content.

If you have 80 minutes and a tolerance for poor presentation style, feel free to watch the announcement from Google I/O.