Web and mobile

The Museum of London’s then-and-now app has just got better

The Museum of London has updated its Streetmuseum app with more than 100 new locations and images.

First launched in 2010, Streetmuseum is considered to be one of the most successful museum apps in the UK. Using geo-tagging and augmented reality, the app overlays historic images at featured sites allowing the user to see how the capital has changed throughout history.

The app now includes photographs of Blackfriars station taken in 1930 and the view of London’s skyline from Brick Lane in 1957. Stories from the capital’s suburbs are also featured, such as the Richmond mods in the 1960s and the Ealing suffragettes in 1912.

The functionality of the app has been improved in the new version and users can also now order prints of images featured.


A family-friendly app created for three Oxfordshire museums

The Museum Trails app has been produced by Oxfordshire-based app designer Wild Knowledge for the Museum of Oxford, Combe Mill and Thame Museum.

The free family-friendly app features trails for each museum; users can select featured exhibits to find out more information, including photographs and some short film clips. There are also child-friendly quizzes for each object, with each answer leading towards a “fiendish” anagram.

The trails do have to be downloaded from within the app, which might put some people off. The text about objects is accessible and informative but, annoyingly, iPhone users can only read a few lines at a time.

The app, which is available for Apple and Android users, was funded by South East Museum Development and is a good example of how museums can work together to create mobile experiences.

I haven’t seen many museum mobile devices making use of quizzes, but this seems like an easy and effective way to create an app that families can experience together.


A new website is the first product of the RA’s digital strategy

In the lead-up to the Royal Academy of Arts’ (RA) 250th anniversary in 2018, the gallery has launched a new digital strategy that aims to provide new ways for audiences to engage online.

The first stage of this is a website, developed with design firm Ideo, which has partly been informed through consultation with visitors.

The site aims to reflect the academy’s exhibition programme but also its collection of British art and its role as an art school. As a result, the navigation bar has been split in two and simplified to just three options on the left (exhibitions and events, news and blog, and artists) and four on the right (about, visit, support and shop).

There is also a search tool and sign-in option, but these are not quite prominent enough and could easily be lost.

The overall look of the site is bold and image-heavy. It is fully accessible on tablets and smartphones as well as desktop computers, but it looks a lot better on the first two. In fact, the design of the site suggests the RA expects a lot if not the majority of its web traffic to come via mobile devices in the future.

For example, users can scroll down (and down) the homepage to browse a large amount of content – blogs, articles from RA Magazine, exhibition details and so on. I found it slightly overwhelming on the desktop, but on tablet it was much easier to browse in the same way you might a news website.

The RA says the homepage is “something of an experiment”, and it will be interesting to see whether it decides to refine it further down the line.