The Hungarian National Museum on web
At least ten people were sitting on the other side of the table. I felt like at my highschool graduation. The official site of the Hungarian National Museum was at stake. This time the two of us made the referral.
But as soon as we got to the triumvirate of content management, usability and agility, the dividing line drawn by the table started slowly to disappear.
The foggy promise
In a few days the plan turned to reality. We discussed the functions every second week paying special attention to the structure and graphic design. Ideas coming from different directions started to make shape: should be modern and at the same time old fashioned, innovative and common.
In line with the development we started the site building as well. We did not rush with the makeup: we matured the visual design until every participant of the project felt satisfied with what they saw.
As long as the graphic is not followed completely through, any function-demo you show will be saltless, as your own imagination needs to dress up the naked site. This requires a lot of patience and trust from the customer. They need to trust that the two lines really will reach each other, and the live site will meet the previously visualized design. This kind of trust usually forms slowly, in very small steps in case of a new partnership.
While the team was enthusiastic about the plans and technical solutions, I tried to show the progress, and catch the customer’s signals. The undressed function is half the battle for the developer, but only a promise for the customer. A promise, that he soon will be able to touch that beautiful user interface he longs for.
The price of simplification
We selected the views carefully, and meanwhile we worked out a walking logic which can stir the user the preferred way. In the beginning, all museum departments wanted to show their whole content on the front page. But after a couple of discussions we convinced them that first of all we are creating the site for the museum visitors, not for the museum itself. So the content related to the organization is secondary compared to the end user experience.
We started with a dozen of main items. All of them were important and necessary. But together with our customer we started to sort and trim. No mercy, we needed to roll back the main menu to seven items. While we thanked George Miller, the Museum menu sucked: all organizational needs got aligned there, which we could not reduce to seven, no matter how hard we tried to reshuffle. Eleven categories and the overladen Museum information group was the price we needed to pay to simplify the front site and general navigation. It was worth it.
Relaxing is good
Szilárd started to design a view showing the exhibitions on the main site. In the beginning, he visualized something like this:
But after some other variations, we rejected the idea. We tried with some other shapes but we did not tumble on the right one which is original, usable on all monitors, and has a satisfying visual aspect.
I was obvious that there was no need to rush the process, but rather let it rest for a while, and get back to it after some sprints. Finally this one became the winner:
We welcomed the customer’s idea about illustrating the exhibitions with panoramic photos. The user gets an impression of the exhibition hall and can easily decide whether to visit or not. The renewed exhibition which covers four hundred thousand years from prehistory till the Settlement could for example be a nice surprise.
Final
After finishing such main functions as collections, ground plan, phone register, public data, events and blog, we started to fine-tune the layout and text control. Each content got an English and a Hungarian editing surface. We considered four editing breakpoints: mobile portrait, mobile landscape / tablet portrait, tablet landscape / normal desktop, XL desktop. We created a separate scheme for the colour edition. The editor can select in which colour scheme a given exhibition/content should be realized.
In the last two iterations of the project we helped the customer with uploading contents, while also doing the testing and error-correcting.
The Museum show
This is our first museum project, but we know for sure it is not the last one. It is a pleasure to work on a website which my retired aunt also understands and appreciates. Get this museum show on the road!
