The Gilbert Collections

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This is a british gallery I came across when browsing London museums. I personally liked this sites design and found it very easy and consistent to navigate. Your standard liquid three column layout, done exceptionally well. The nav bar is on the right, with a directors selection and image in the left column. I like the idea of a directors selection because it shows that the site is updated and bring a personal touch to the online experience. It brings a sort of gallery environment to the user at home. The navigation is nice, nothing is poping up at you when you mouseover and when you click a link the bar will adjust to show you where you are and what options you have. Everything is fairly easy to find, the hours could be a little more obvious, but other then that it's a home run compared to Blanton's. Dead center on the home page is your mission/about statement and is pulled together nicely with an image of an artwork, leading you to the navbar or search function. Also, the interactive visual map of their collections is a great idea. Uniformity and simplicity dominate the design and create an enjoyable user experience.

http://www.mfah.org

http://www.blantonmuseum.org

Comparing the Blanton with the Houston Museum of Art shows a major difference in usability. The Houston museum provides general links accross the top with drop down menus which give the user many specific options. The Blanton has a similar feature, but the menus do not work as well and are horizontal. This is confusing to the user as to which topic the menu pertains.

The changing graphic on the Houston museum site is engaging, but it is very large in comparison to the rest of the page and distracts the user from finding neccesary information. However, the inclusion of a search tool on top provides the user with the ability to personalize their visit to the site.

The Blanton has four small images which correlate to the different collections, but they are duplicate links to those found on the collections page. There are no search functions available on the home page, and the format is confusing.

Overall, the Blanton museum has a bad layout with too much white space, small print, and bad locations for links. The colors are also difficult to look at on the white background. In contrast, the Houston Museum has an accessible menu system which loads up first on the page, and contains colors which are pleasing to the eye and relevant to the purpose of the website.

http://www.seattleartmuseum.org/

Site Design: While the Blanton page is plagued with redundant links that confuses the user and make them scroll through extra length, the SAM's page has neatly organized their content into individual blocks of information. By doing so consistently through out the entire site, the users know what they are looking at and where to find the information of their interest. Repeating links occupying extra space is a big disadvange to the Blanton's website. Users have limited attention and if everytime they click on the link all they see on the top 2/3 or even the entire screen is just a repeated list of links they just clicked on, it could easily discourage use of website.

Layout: The excess of white space and links in the Blanton page is confusing to the user the SAM's page distributes the space evenly so the content looks clean, organized and esthetically pleasing. The SAM's page also uses color more effitiently tying it with the content making the page less distracting. The Blanton page, on the other hand uses color that is harder on the eye scattered throughout the page and offering little help to the organization/usability of the page.

http://www.blantonmuseum.org/
http://www.miamiartmuseum.org/

I have compared the websites of the Blanton Museum and the Miami Art Museum. The Blanton Museum site has a lot of white space which is not very aesthetically pleasing. It has many links in random places on the page which is difficult for first time visitors to navigate. The home page is very bland and the user does not know where to focus because the print looks the same as the links and the majority of the page is blank.
The Miami Art Museum home page is more focused on the center of the page, this makes it so that the user is directed toward the flash picture in the center of the page which is about the exhibition at the time. The top of the page has a toolbar which is easy to navigate and has pictures that go along with the section which makes it even easier to navigate. There is a background color instead of white so the page looks nicer and there are links on the home page to 'visit us', 'about MAM', 'exhibitions', 'membership' which should be easily accessible from any museum home page.

Blanton and Denver Art Museum (http://www.denverartmuseum.org/)

The Blanton site is wasted, layout-wise. Whitespace and useless information is presented, both confusing and overloading the user. The user has no idea what to focus on first - there is no central structure to the page, either. In contrast, the Denver site is simple. The purpose of the site is clear by the large collage of art from across the world. This is an art museum, and not just paintings, either. Also, the featured parts of the site are very easy to interpret as such. However, if the user wants to find something specific, the menubar is avaliable at the top of the page.

Also, the entire "heading" of the Blanton is very large - about 400 pixels. Even on a 1024x768 screen, this is more than half the page height. This makes scrolling inevitable on smaller screens. The Denver site, however, only has about a 100 pixel heading that stays with each page. This allows for more of the site to be displayed at once.

Structurally, the Blanton is also very confusing. The fact that there are sub-menus within the main menu is annoying, and the site just provides too much useless information. There is a tendancy for information to be split up into two columns on the Blanton, with only the lower right section actually containing information. On the Denver, Almost 80% of the page is dedicated to information, making it easier to digest. Even though the two sites have the same amount of copy, the Denver is just less intimidating because of how it is presented.

www.nashersculpturecenter.org

Needless to say the Blanton site needs some work. The pages look like they were thrown together in haste in order to meet a dead line. The lack of organization and massive amount of negative space doesn’t allow the readers eye to flow across the page easily. The over extensive paragraphs are also daunting, especially since they are on the first page. Right off the bat one loses their incentive to go further into the site. It gives the museum as a whole a non-professional vibe which is one aspect the Blanton is trying to steer away from.

The Nasher Sculpture Center’s website, however, is much nicer with layout and organization. Though the first homepage might go a little overboard with the flash sculptures moving around the room, the over all layout is simple and pleasing to the eyes. They didn’t over-do it with colors. Since they knew they would be showing art they kept it simple with a grey/white theme, accented with a pleasing green. All of the main pages have the same look, with just the picture on the right changing. This also makes the site non-confusing. Also the fact that it is opened in a smaller window with no scrolling makes the site also simple and gives off the feel of easy navigation. The scrolling that needs to be done, if any, is within the page (as in only the top part moves, the rest of the page stays the same).

BlantonMuseum.org
mfah.org
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The Blanton Musuem's current website is a horrible mess of bad webdesign and outdated information. The menu system is very poorly constructed, as it only truly works at the second level of pages. The ratio of information to white space is horrible. The content on some of the content pages is all over some of the pages, in some of the weirdest spots. Also, some of the images that appear in the menu as image links are just images. I'm sure this causes great confusion, especially users with not quite as much experience using the internet yet. Some of the pages haven't been updated in quite a while as well. For example, the pictures/updates for the construction for the new museum are over a year old. To me that seems like a huge mistake because you would want the audience to follow the construction closely because that could cause some excitement in the public for the completion of the wonderful new building. Overall, this design needs to be turned upside down.

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On the other hand, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston's website has a much cleaner, better design. The content to white space ratio is much much smaller, meaning the MFAH's site is able to provide much more useful information per page than the Blanton's site. The top drop-down menu system is much much cleaner and easier to use than Blanton's. One feature I really like about the MFAH's site is the convenient search box at the top of every page, that way it is incredibly easy to find information if you don't want to dig through the website. Links on the MFAH's site are also very much more distinguable than Blanton's links. On the pages, they make use of blue, non-underlined text links, which are more easily distiguished from regular text, as opposed to Blanton, which included confusing images that could have been either a link or just an image that looked like a link.

In conclusion, the MFAH's website is a fine example of well thought out web design, while the Blanton's website is well thought out example of a train wreck.

I compared the Blanton website to the website of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). I visited the sites with several tasks in mind, with regard to planning a future visit. I wanted to see what the current exhibitions would be at the time of my visit, as well as general information about visiting the museum (hours of operation, location, admission, etc).

The SFMOMA uses all of Nielsen’s recommendations for a good home page. They have a logo on the top left side of the page, so you know where you are, and a search box on the top right side of the page, so you can find what you want. The navigational bar across the top of the page makes sense from a user’s perspective and makes it easy to find out how to visit the museum (it’s actually the first link). The current exhibitions are (rightly) the main content on the homepage. With a sample image from the exhibition, the title, and the dates of the exhibition on display, it’s easy for a user to scan and decide whether or not it’s interesting enough to click on.

The Blanton home page could use some work before it becomes user-friendly. It does have the museum’s logo on the top left side, but the University of Texas at Austin and College of Fine Arts logos are above it on the page, and slightly larger, which could be confusing for a user who didn’t navigate from one of those sites. There is no site-wide search feature on the top right side, or anywhere else on the home page, or any where else on the site. There are lots of navigation options, which is good for a home page, but it is all clustered at the top of the page, which requires me to scroll down to see basic information about the museum.

The home pages of both sites are resizeable, allowing users with all but the smallest screens to access their sites easily. Both sites also make good use of alt tags on graphics, so users with visual impairment can understand what is there. However, neither site allows users to resize the text, which is not so friendly for users with less severe vision problems.

http://www.blantonmuseum.org
http://ncartmuseum.org

The Blanton Museum website has numerous usability issues that could be improved. There isn’t a very efficient use of space. The majority of the pages are whitespace and scrolling down to find information is required on almost every page. Thus a more compact site could save the user lots of scrolling time. The link system is also not very intuitive. Most users do not expect the second level of links in the sitemap to be on the right column of the page. Also the roll over links do not show the second level links for the current page you are viewing, which isn’t what the user would expect. Also the font is a bit small and hard to read, especially on my computer with 1600x1200 screen resolution. Also orange links on a white background isn’t the best choice of font colors. Also a link on the page called “members only” does not link to where the user would expect. Rather than being a link to some page that only members can see, it opens the users default mail program and starts composing to volunteer@blantonmuseum.org, which is the same link as the VOLUNTEER link right above it. Thus the link is sending the user to somewhere other than what they expect. These are the main usability issues with the Blanton Museum website.
The North Carolina Museum of Art’s website has much fewer usability issues. The site is compact and utilizes screen real estate. The majority of the pages require no scrolling which is nice. Most of the links are more distinguished from the text because they are underlined with standard color scheme. A bar of links is on the left and top is fixed and never changes from page to page. Also a link to a sitemap is given for the site which can be very useful for the user. When I click the “what’s new” link, there is no side bar or top bar or site logo shown on the page. This is not what the user expects to happen. The site is also well structured. Each of the level 1 links has a folder of that name and the level 2 links of the sitemap are all html files inside that folder.
Overall, I would say that the Blanton Museum has much worse usability and has much more room for improvement. However, there are still a few usability issues that could be fixed with the North Carolina Museum of Art webpage.

The usability of the Blanton website is very poor. Because the content does not resize to fit the browser window, and because of the small text and lack of graphics, white space dominates the page. Any graphics, or hints at art at all, are minimized. Navigation tools clutter what is left, placing most of the content where users must scroll to reach it. Redundant headings, appear in each and every section, and a “return to main page” link on each page would be best served by an upper-left hand logo or picture. The text for the entire site is small.

The website for the Art Institute of Chicago is an elegantly designed space. It makes great use of positive and negative space, allowing the white space to delineate navigation from content. A graphic standard for content is adhered to throughout the entire site – burnt orange and blue-gray colored boxes, arranged differently depending on exactly what information needs to be conveyed, are combined with large text and graphics for an aesthetically pleasing affect. The boxes can divide information from links and other points of interest. The navigation buttons, found at the top of every page, take up little room, and indicate which area of the site you are in by changing from white to burnt orange. Links within the site have a standard look, burnt orange when on a white background, white underlined when on a colored background, however, visited links do not change color. Relevant information to the museum, such as an events calendar, is present on the home page.

A website for a museum should be a piece of art in and of itself, enticing the viewer to go check out what the gallery has to offer. It should therefore be attractive, designed to place emphasis on the displays, and structured to make navigating the site easy and fun! I think overall the construction of the Blanton site is quite primitive and underdeveloped.

There is little to no aesthetic appeal in terms of a color scheme and set up of the Blanton website. It is mainly white space with patches of text and a few small pictures. The Texas Memorial Museum has a very fitting earthy color scheme for its website, since its displays are concerned with biology, geology, and the environment. The TMM homepage is also very organized and makes finding exactly what you are looking for a breeze, especially since it has a search feature.

The navigation of the Blanton site is also confusing and unorganized. For starters, it is not clear that all of the links are actually links. Some of them are just not obvious, and one is an actual sentence about the grand opening. There is no consistent navigation bar with easy-to-use hover links, unlike the website of the Texas Memorial Museum. The TMM site has a permanent navigation bar that effectively utilizes hover links to display all of the links on the subpages. The links are clear and obvious, and there is also a site map for backup! The TMM site also has uniformity throughout. The color scheme is consistent and subpages are easily recognizable and grouped. The Blanton homepage and subpages all have the same format and are not easily distinguished. Also, unlike the TMM site, the Blanton subpages do not have links to return to the homepage. The Blanton site is simply not well thought out and clearly not well maintained.

The Blanton Museum website is highly disorganized. A lot of the links are overlapped on multiple pages making it hard to navigate and find what you need. Although some of the links are different colors, not all of them are. You can't tell other links from actual text as they are the same color, font, and size. Also, some links are in the form of pictures or a group of texts.

The site also has a lot of white space on it, making it unattractive and empty. The site's layout is not very effective. You have to literally search the page to find what you are looking for and since the pages all have the exact same layout, colors, and pictures. It is difficult to tell when the a page has changed as only the text changes and no headings or titles are made.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art on the other hand is much more visibly attractive. different pages have different color backgrounds. They have similar layouts to make searching easier, but still different enough to distinguish between. The site is more organized and doesn't have many overlapped links. It provides the user with more information rather than just space fillers. It also has many different pictures to draw more interest. Each page also has a title to let you know where you are at in the web page. The Metropolitan Museum also has a nice search bar to make navigating easier.

http://www.blantonmuseum.org/
http://www.guggenheim.org/

The Blanton- Is it Bland-ton or Blanton? Looking at the current website for UT's newest museum, I would assume the former. The first thing my eye is drawn to on the Blanton page is VOLUNTEER! Why is this of such high priority? Why is the grand opening information (which would seem much more important) shoved over to the left side of the page, under the watercolor rendering? The use of yellow text on a white background is a poor choice for legibility. The links open new windows, which is very annoying and prevents much exploration. The size of the page is too long, you have to scroll & shouldn't have to, especially with the small amount of content on the page & excessive, poorly placed white space. The current layout does not provide any real resting spots for the eyes. The headlines are neither clear nor consistant. For example, look at "collections", the color, font & size of this headline is the same as the categories below it. This page just makes me tired when I look at it. What's up with the four pictures on the upper right part of the page? There's information provided when you click on each picture, but why are they relevant? Are they part of the Blanton's permanant collection? Part of a future exhibit? The only kudos I can give the Blanton is that they use alt tags on their images for visually impaired patrons. Grade: D

The Guggenheim- This site is nicely layed out & cleanly organzed. There is very little or no scrolling of pages required, and all of the primary pages fit nicely on my monitor. The links are clearly marked & do not open a new window every time you click on them. The contrast is nice & easy to read. The pages are nicely chunked with headings and pictures that are nicely layed out to provide resting stops for the eyes and keep the viewer interested. There is a search bar provided to find something you are looking for quickly. Alt tags are used for the visually impaired. Grade: A+

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http://www.blantonmuseum.org/index.html

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http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/home.html

The Blanton Museum website is boring, unappealing, redundant, and awkward to navigate. The Blanton website has text that is too small, requires too much scrolling, is inconsistent, and the organization and layout of the pages are counterintuitive. The navigation links are repetitive and add more confusion than guidance. The choice of color combinations and fonts look unprofessional or amateurish and lack a sense of prestige that is expected from a museum website. Besides the random (almost) thumbnail size pictures, the site really does not speak “art” or “art museum” to me. The Blanton website lacks scannability, credibility, and a sense of tone and style.

My favorite thing about the Ransom Center site is its coordinated use of color, which adds artistic appeal and logically ties the site together. The navigation links are concise and self-explanatory. The primary content of each page is located front and center and does not require a lot of tedious scrolling and searching for key content. However, once you click on one of the main navigation links, the drop-down menus become redundant and congestive to the page. Aside from the annoying drop-down menus, I would say that this site is pretty clean or sharp, which is the impression I want the Blanton site to leave.

The Modern: Fort Worth
http://www.themodern.org/

Blanton: Austin
http://www.blantonmuseum.org/

The Blanton Museum website is one of the least interesting websites made for a museum. Considering the function of the website is supposed to not only inform the viewer of exhibitions, hours, etc. and also to entice the viewer to want to visit the museum in person, the website is uncreative and boring. There is a stunning lack of color and visual graphics. The Modern site uses colors and multiple graphics to make the page interesting to view. In terms of layout, the frames that the Modern site uses are easily accessible and more compatible with other resolutions. The Blanton's site has small text that is hard to view from 1024x768 resolutions and above for elderly people that are vision impaired. The modern uses a bigger text size and is considerally more efficient if the viewer would like to print a page from the site. Because the Blanton has the navigation taking up the entire top half of the browser window, when the viewer prints the page, they will be waisting their ink on the navigation graphics.

Being a website of a gallery that features artwork, the website should reflect an artistic quality and in a sense be a work of art itself. The Blanton website has nothing artistic about it. The website is boring and inefficient for its purpose.

http://www.nmsi.ac.uk/index.asp?flash=yes
http://www.blantonmuseum.org/

The Blanton Museum has a poor website design that doesn’t really seem to take into account the usability. Apart from its excessive use of white space which occupies a majority of the website, links are also cluttering every page. The links might be useful, but instead they end up repeating each other and some functions to not even work properly. The actual layout needs to be redesigned because as it is, the site tends to be uneven and unbalanced in the actual content present. Very little content is actually present, compared to the excessive links that are scattered throughout. Scrolling is also a problem since there really isn't even significant information at the bottom of the pages.

In contrast, The National Museum of Science and Industry encompasses a much larger scale of information and content, and is able to deliver. The site is actually a collection of several museums in the UK. If looked at individually, the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television, for example, combines the simplicity of user friendly websites, with the elegance of a creative design. The layout seems very basic, but has a modern approach that is appealing. Links are categorized more appropriately and the organization makes it easier to navigate. The different museum sites each have their own approach; however, they are all able to avoid distracting the user from the actual information and/or content that actually drew them to the website. The scrolling function is pretty much eliminated because the entire page fits nicely on the screen without appearing cluttered.

McGovern Museum of Health and Medical Science (http://www.mhms.org/) vs. Blanton Museum (http://www.blantonmuseum.org/)

Blanton's links are very disorganized. It is fairly difficult to navigate and it can be hard to find something I am looking for without having to go to the site map. There is also a lot of white space that could probably be used to expand their content or include images to enhance their design.

The links are also all images instead of text. Links are also repeated in several areas of a page or on several pages. They also don't follow the same pattern on all pages. For example, some pages have rollovers and some don't.

The content on the first page is also an image instead of text. This is uncool because I can't copy/paste information. There are also images of some art on the top of some pages, but there isn't a heading or any description, so I have no idea why it's there or why I should be looking at them.

The MHMS also has a significant amount of white space, but it is more usable than Blanton's. Links are organized by categories. Secondary links are listed under the main links. Because the site has a lot of textual information, there is a link on every page for an option to print. There is also a search form, so it could be fairly easy to find a specific topic, etc.
Some negatives about NHMS are that the pages don't follow the same pattern. Some pages have different fonts, large text, some have small text.

http://www.blantonmuseum.org/
http://www.thestoryoftexas.com/

The Blanton Museum website has a lot of unused white space compared to the History Museum’s. When I look at the Blanton website, I have to look up and down left and right to see where I’m headed—there are links on both sides and most of them are repetitive, they have different names but consist of the same information. For example the “Become a member” and “join online” can be combined into one page and have one less link on the homepage. Also the hover links do not work on the main page. The structural navigation bar on the history museum however is much more effective. It goes across the top of the page and has working hover links and links within themselves. It is easy to get around the website that way and to quickly find the information you are looking for. The page is also in the center unlike the Blanton website where there is excessive white space on the right hand side of the page. On the history museum, the white space is evenly distributed and the way it is used, it makes the user focus on one part of the website—the center. Scrolling down on the history museum website, the user sees the newest information on the top, and scrolling down within the page (a new frame), you can see older info.

One major thing I like about the history museum over the Blanton is that it has its own sitemap—it’s got everything for users who prefer simplicity as well. With the sitemap, it is quick and easy to find information one is interested in. As with the links, there are also some administrative links at the bottom of the page and I think that’s pretty universal—most corporate websites have those at the bottom and the links that are more customer oriented are at top.

Another major aspect, a common sense one, of the history museum over the Blanton is that on every internal page of the site, it has a direct link to go back to the main page, home, at the top of the navigation bar. It can be quite annoying to having to go back up to the address bar and retyping the main address or having to click “back” too many times.