Web and mobile

Rebecca Atkinson on her impressions of this new website

The question of how you extend a museum experience beyond the physical visit is much discussed, with digital technology often looked to for the answer.

The design team behind the new Van Gogh Museum website – Fabrique, which was also responsible for the much-lauded Rijksmuseum website – has created a site that provides all the necessary information but tries to introduce people to the artist and his work ahead of their visit.

To this end, the website’s homepage is split. To the left, under Visit the Museum, is a list of popular options such as what’s on and online tickets. To the right, is a detail of Vincent Van Gogh’s Branches from an Almond Tree. “Meet Vincent,” the text reads, “Brotherly love: Vincent & Theo”.

This isn’t a link (I tried clicking more than once), but further down is a smallish arrow and the option to “Read full story”. What comes next is a series of 12 bite-size extracts about the Van Gogh brothers.

It’s a nice way to tell the story, with layered information and different media, even if it is a little tiresome having to click through it all.

From every page there is the option to return home or pull up a menu button. Annoyingly, the menu is really just a repeat of the homepage options and you have to click through further to get more details.

It’s also ugly-looking – perhaps not the worse crime, but the black background and brown search bar is in stark contrast to the Van Gogh artworks and motifs used elsewhere on the site.

There seem to be other bits missing from the website – details of its social media channels, for example. Perhaps too much of the site is dedicated to getting to know Vincent and not enough to the museum.


Asian culture for desktop travellers

At first glance, you wouldn’t know that this free children’s app has anything to do with museums. It was launched by the Boston Children’s Museum and the US Association of Children’s Museums.

The game aims to educate children about Asian culture through the use of a criminal mastermind versus secret agent format. A group of teen Asian bloggers has been assembled to catch a mysterious thief with a penchant for stealing cultural landmarks and objects.

Players travel to the bloggers’ various countries and are presented with a series of options that develop a story and reveal useful bits of information about different cultures as they go.

The app is probably best suited to being used by families at home; it is a bit text heavy, but the information is interesting. I got a bit lost making my way through the story (I couldn’t get off a page about Korean food, for some reason) and the whole mysterious thief plot took a while to get going, but the app has plenty of appeal, in the same way that Choose Your Own Adventure books did in the 1990s.

Does it matter that there is no obvious link to museums? It feels like a missed opportunity.


Rebecca Atkinson on the trials and errors in four museum apps

After receiving money from the Heritage Lottery Fund to explore digital access to its collections, Buxton Museum and Art Gallery has created four web-based museum apps using the WordPress site.

Each app is a trail aimed at a particular audience – a tour about Buxton waters for tourists; Buxton shops for locals; a tour of the Arbor Low prehistoric site for Peak District walkers; and a family activity.

The apps are still being trialled and the team behind the project is evaluating the audience responses. But they show what can be achieved without a large budget. Oral history recordings with local people help to bring to life the stories of Buxton’s high street of the past, for example.

They also reveal the challenges that museums face when designing apps that offer real and sustainable value. For example, with a 3G signal not available at the neolithic Arbor Low site in Derbyshire, anyone who wants to use it must find the web page in advance.

Much of the content created for these trails could have been provided in printed form (and indeed you can print off the trails), but, as with all things digital, for many museums it’s about trying new things and seeing what works.