IMA Lab Lead Software Architect, Gray Bowman and Senior Digital Graphic Designer, Rita Troyer showcase the development and design behind the Indianapolis Museum of Art Collection Page Redesign.
8. A web page that is delivered to the user exactly as
stored, in contrast to dynamic web pages which are
generated by a web application.
Static web pages are suitable for content that never or
rarely needs to be updated. However, maintaining large
numbers of static pages as files can be impractical
without automated tools.
Any personalization or interactivity has to be run client
side.
STATIC WEB PAGE
Dagwood concept: all layers of the sandwich rep an isolated data source
Not the first time: Mercury – antiquated, complex (java, maven, with a lot of dependencies), fragile, missing data sources, little internal skill or will
Drawing of the sources, with dagwood in the middle, isolating the new datasources vs mercury
Tags (Steve), extended text
Both well proven, stable technologies that are highly unlikely to drastically change (angular)
Could have stopped here and refactored the drupal page to use the new middleware
All this data comes from a database. Every time the page is loaded.
Caching can help, but only for anonymous users.
Typical drupal page can be well over 100 db queries
Wanted to use this opportunity to enhance the collection pages
Grunt, assemble.io, markdown
Sync methodology – update versus rebuild – instead of matching records, less bookkeeping - much less error prone
- Object tiles
R
-From September 2013-October 2014, mobile and tablet users to imamuseum.org have increased to 40% of our overall website traffic.
COLLECTION SECTION
-Visitors view more pages (4 pages/session) and stay 1 minute longer than on pages throughout the rest of the site. 4 minute average visit.
-Within the collection section, users visit more than one artwork 45% of the time and are returning to search and browse.
-Overall, users who visit the collection section are staying in the collection section or going to Visit.
Overall we wanted to design these pages to have a more clean, mobile first user interface approach.
The result is a more streamlined user experience with an object. The goal of these pages is to encourage exploration and discoverability of objects throughout our collection.
Addition of Search the Collection in navigation
More minimal navigation, no footer (caters to users who already stay in this section)
Bring more presence to object imagery
Zoom functionality
Full screen viewer
Alternate object views
Rights and reproductions info / Image DL info
Object status (on view/not on view)
Immediately pop down to info/tombstone information if you’d like
For objects that have lots of content, there is now a greater emphasis on research items unique to the IMA.
(photography, gallery labels, provenance information, related text, multimedia content,, collection data)
Our hope is to expand this into more info unique to the IMA ex: conservation, archives
Object information/tombstone
Addition of colors
Eventual linking of all fields
Encourage cross-collection exploration with increased visibility of the newly renamed “You May Also Like” vs More Like This and future browse items