Whitney Museum: website redesign

Here’s the website for the Whitney: http://www.whitney.org/

The front page is a bit thin, with lots of space devoted to the background rather than to more pictures of the art. This
thinness leads to lots of drill-downs, which may lead to viewers dropping out and off the site.

The boxed clickdown buttons on the Whitney frontpage do not seem to display properly in the Safari browser, or maybe they
are just clunky.

Here’s a review by Perry Garvin: http://www.perrygarvin.net/blog/2009/11/12/whitney-website-redesign/

The review helpfully links to several other museum website redesigns for comparison.

Perry Garvin’s Whitney review emphasizes deficiencies in the details of hierarchical ordering of information. The
solution to this is not more orderly hierarchies but a flatter structure. Better to show 200 links on the opening screen
so that viewers can scan many options arrayed adjacent in space rather than stacked in drill-down hierarchies–in other
words, more like the frontpage of a news website or the iPhone. A link-heavy and art-rich homepage would serve as a
reliable common base for returning from drill-down forays (again like the iPhone).

More generally, why are museum websites hierarchical and concealing instead of flat and revealing? Another instance of Conway’s Law? “Any organization which designs a system . . . will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” More on Conway’s Law and design at

https://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00025o