Digital reviews

Kew Gardens’ new website greets you on arrival with an illustration of plants so fragrant looking that you can almost smell them. Equally lushly enhanced with photography throughout, the website has been redesigned and migrated to a new platform by Kew’s digital team, in collaboration with the Shoreditch digital agency Manifesto.

The site works equally well on desktop and mobile, delivering functional information about the London and Wakehurst sites. Finding events and activities is easy, if a little clunky, with a series of checkboxes and filters, rather than more-intuitive labels.

If plants and fungi are your thing, you can dive deeper into the Read & Watch section. The same slightly awkward filters will help you narrow down your search for articles you might be interested in, but the content itself feels slightly thin, and quite heavily oriented toward encouraging a visit to Kew. Like many museums, Kew could make more of its digital content as a standalone offer to audiences interested in its subject matter, as well as the venue.

The site is well put together, and what you should expect from a cultural heritage website in 2019, but a major design overhaul such as this should be the beginning of a journey for Kew, rather than the end of a project. 

Too often, cultural heritage organisations proceed digitally in leaps and bounds, rather than continually working to improve the experience for users. Here’s hoping Kew can keep the momentum going, rather than keep us waiting for the next redesign.

How many tabs are open in your web browser right now? There’s always another article or website to look at before you’ve finished the last. To amplify (or perhaps alleviate) the constant distraction, the Science Museum labs team has spun up Museum in a Tab.

Install the extension in your browser, and each time you open a fresh tab, rather than a blank screen, you’ll see an object drawn at random from the Science Museum’s collection of more than seven million objects. It could be anything from a sheet of algebraic equations to a nickel-plated surgical tool.

And if you have a museum collection to show off, the Science Museum has open-sourced its code, so you can build your own version. 

As part of a series of events marking the 200th anniversary of the Peterloo massacre and the struggle for democracy, this interactive website from Manchester Histories allows you to explore the events of the day, find out what happened to the campaigners as hussars attacked, and learn about the aftermath.

The centrepiece is an interactive 3D reconstruction of St Peter’s Field in Manchester, where the massacre took place, seen from several vantage points. You can take a linear tour of 13 stops, or dive into more than 100 hotspots. Some pop-ups deliver slightly more text to wade through than is comfortable, and images of collections objects are awkwardly shoehorned into the narrative.

The 3D technology used isn’t that flashy, but sometimes simple things work well. St Peter’s Field is long gone, but exploring the dynamic illustrations helps reimagine the place and the events in a way that’s often lacking from historical description.