Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
- Stephen Beemsterboer (balbuf) — Web Engineer
- Kathy Beck (kbeck3030) — UX Engineer
- Ellen Diamond — Account Manager
- J. Hogue (artinruins) — Director of Design & UX
- Ben Holt (Bits8myBytes) — Web Engineer
- Jason LeVan (codeclarified) — Web Engineer
- Jordan Perkins — Project Manager
The RISD Museum is the 20th largest art museum in the United States with over 100,000 objects in its collection, including Ancient art, costumes, textiles, painting, sculpture, contemporary art, furniture, photography, and more. The museum occupies more than 72,000 square feet in three historic and two contemporary buildings along Providence’s bustling South Main Street and riverfront.
The RISD Museum serves the student design & arts community but extends far beyond that, bringing alumni, travelers, and design enthusiasts from all over the world. Providence, Rhode Island, is lucky to have many cultural institutions in our backyard. The colleges here — Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, Johnson & Wales, Rhode Island College — have beautiful libraries and museum resources that the entire community benefits from.
About the project
Nothing short of a Revolution was Needed
We often say that a website redesign is more like a collective therapy session — it’s an opportunity to air grievances in a safe space, to think about the future untethered to the present situation, and make decisions that could change the course of the organization. Since many websites are more than just a marketing platform, a redesign can affect the entire organization and the way they communicate their value to their own team and the world.
At the heart of this project was a large, existential question: What does it mean to be a physical institution collecting physical objects in a digital world? What do viewers want out of a museum experience in an interactive space? Can a museum be more relaxed about how viewers will interpret the work?
The aesthetics of the site became a structural backdrop for the objects, artwork, and images of people in the physical spaces of the museum.
Our gray and white wireframes evolved into a black and white interface that kept information clear and clean while allowing the colors of the artwork to shine through. Language around the site’s architecture was simplified and tested for clarity. An element of time — words like Soon, Upcoming, Now, Ongoing, Past — keeps the visitor grounded around the idea of a physical visit, while open access to objects online serves a whole community of art lovers and historians that may never be able to visit in person.
A particularly bold storytelling idea came out of our collective collaborative process. The homepage wireframe first draft that we provided was a pretty typical overview of all the various bits of content that can be found deeper inside the site — events, publications, announcements, etc. But our wireframe also included a “hero” image that we suggested could be HTML5 auto-playing background video. The RISD team took that idea and ran with it. One video might be cool, but wouldn’t four videos be even cooler?
While we were hesitant at first, the concept of the homepage being a gateway into the physical space works very well. Without choosing a path via the navigation, the video is just the exterior of the museum. Click on Visit or Exhibitions & Events and the video takes the viewer inside to explore the spaces and the objects. Instead of a homepage that assumes a visitor wants to see everything and then choose something to explore deeper, this one introduces them to the content in a way that connects them to the physical space and shows them around without a commitment to one type of content. It is a pretty radical idea for a museum to run with, but this approach has proved fortuitous.
Back to topVisitor Impact
+11% Pages per session
-15% Bounce rate
Awards & Recognition
- Webby: 2019 Nominee Best Visual Design — Function
- SCA Summit International: 2019 Gold Travel/Tourism/Nature
- W3 Awards: 2019 Silver Visual Appeal & Utility
- W3 Awards: 2019 Silver User Experience
- Communicator Awards: 2019 Excellence, Cultural Institutions
- Communicator Awards: 2019 Distinction, User Interface
- Web Award: 2019 Outstanding Website
- Davey Awards: 2019 Silver Cultural Institutions, Silver Best use of Video/Moving Images
Why Drupal was chosen
Behind the Museum’s initiative to re-platform the website from a closed proprietary system to open source was another, perhaps even larger, initiative: a plan to “open source” the museum’s entire collection. They want to bring all 100,000 objects online (they had a little over 13,000 available prior to launch, a mere 13% of the total) and use a Creative Commons license system that would allow visitors to download and repurpose high-resolution images whenever the objects are in the public domain.
MuseumPlus & Drupal 8 equals Open Access
The heavy lift for our engineers was an integration with RISD’s museum software, MuseumPlus. MuseumPlus needed to continue to be the source of truth for any object, artist, or exhibition. The teams again collaborated extensively to work towards an API that could provide all the correct information between the two databases, and a system of daily jobs and manual overrides to start a synchronization process. As the online connection grows, these connections will be the critical link between the public-facing object data and the internal records.
With Drupal 8, this in-depth integration between an open source platform and a more proprietary, closed system was possible with the powerful built-in API connection points.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Due to the size of the collection (+1000,000 objects), a much more robust search was needed. Solr was added after launch to support the massive amount of items in the museums search.
