LUCRUM powers the new Cleveland Museum of Art website
May 24, 2010
This snapshot shows the new home page for the Cleveland Museum of Art, featuring personalized content, exhibitions information, and highlighted objects from the collection.
It’s a treat when we have the opportunity to publicly showcase work from our portfolio. This week, we invite you to view the results of our most recent assignment with the Cleveland Museum of Art and their new website.
This event marks the successful completion of a two year effort to set a new standard for how museums engage with their visitors. The engagement has followed the LUCRUM iStream methodology – starting with our high-value Stakeholder Alignment Session, though a process of analysis, collaboration, transformation, and now launch – to result in this groundbreaking experience. The website was developed in partnership with the museum staff and award-winning Pentagram Design, based in New York.
One of the most compelling features of the new website is enhanced access to the museum’s encyclopedic collection of over 40,000 objects - many of these iconic works of art are now accessible online, as well as woven into the pages of the site. The objects become part of the fabric of the experience. Large images and a wide range of search options make it easy to wander for hours in the online collection – I encourage you to give it a try!
The redesigned collections browser offers visual access to over 40,000 objects in the Museum's collection.
You’ll not find a single security guard with arms crossed, daring you to approach for a close-up look. Interaction is encouraged, and you are invited to add comments to their favorite objects or tag them with key words so that they are easier for others to find.
The new site also paves the way for more in the way of multimedia features, to provide diverse perspectives on individual works of art and offer behind-the-scenes views of areas within the museum that are not accessible to the general public.
In planning the experience, the design and development teams examined the best online practices of retail and consumer product brands. Social media is heavily integrated into each page of the new site as well, with an option to share content with various online services or add events to a personal calendar. Links are also supplied to the museum’s own Facebook, Twitter and blog accounts.
The simplicity of the navigation was also a key to improving the overall experience for site users. Everything on the site is as close to the homepage as possible, which eliminates the kind of multiple clicks and top-down hierarchical navigation found on a lot of websites. An expanded calendar provides day-by-day views of all activities at the museum, with direct links to more information about the events or to the online box office.
LUCRUM engineered the site using a number of advanced technologies and design innovations. And while the end experience is highly visual and is delivered in an engaging, interactive way, the some of the real marvels are “under the hood.” Think about it – the key to the site’s richness is in the data that it makes available, and the way in which you can engage with that data to find “hidden meaning” and value that was not immeditately obvious.
Sound familiar? The same data strategies and fundamental approaches we use in our business intelligence assignments apply here too. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be talking more about how we applied these principles and how they lead to successful technology projects. In the meantime, take a moment to enjoy the website, and let us know what you think!
-Eric
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