Mobile Web
Today we are releasing a mobile version of our website and are happily following in the footsteps of our colleagues at the Powerhouse Museum and the Walker Art Center, who’ve already done so. As Seb and Justin have already expressed, we started to discover through our analytics more and more users with mobile devices accessing our site, so we wanted to make finding and accessing information as easy as possible on the small screen.
Our native site, above left, renders fairly well on the small screen, but we wanted to slim our presence down to the bare minimum for the mobile version, right. We selected areas with the most traffic—exhibitions, calendar, visit information, Target First Saturday—and made templates that re-render the existing information for mobile.
At the most basic level, this is about ease of use for the visitor with the mobile device, but we had other motivations as well. By launching a mobile site, we can automatically detect and redirect when we see incoming traffic via mobile browsers. This means we can put BklynMuse in the menu of selections and make it more visible and easily found. Without this lovely candy shell, redirecting to BklynMuse on its own would have been confusing.
You’ll notice we are color-coding the menu of choices to indicate different types of usage. Dark gray for informational content, cyan for interactive content and dark sage as the catch-all for things that don’t fit in the other categories. Thanks for this idea, Jenny!
The mobile site also allows us to grow and expand easily and I hope you’ll join me back here for some news on that front tomorrow.
EverydayUX morsels (March 21st – March 24th):
March 24th, 2010 at 9:53 pm
[...] Brooklyn Museum: Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum » Mobile WebGood case study on how great a kick ass mobile web product (vs. an app) can be. [...]
Brooklyn Museum: Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum » Gallery Tag!:
March 25th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
[...] I mentioned yesterday, the creation of a mobile website allows us to grow, so today we are taking advantage of that by introducing a new mobile feature. [...]
Brooklyn Museum: Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum » Mobile Meetup at Target First Saturday:
April 1st, 2010 at 1:53 pm
[...] I mentioned last week, we’re hosting an informal meetup to celebrate the launch of the mobile website and Gallery Tag! If you are coming to Target First Saturday on April 3, bring your mobile and [...]
Michael Müller:
July 14th, 2010 at 9:48 am
Hi,
Congratulations for your mobile website which I find very well done! I would like to learn more about the technical side of the project. Do you use a specialized provider to do the transcoding? Which mobile devices are supported?
All the best,
Michael
Brooklyn Museum: Community: bloggers@brooklynmuseum » Brooklyn Museum Mobile Web on iPhone and Droid:
July 27th, 2010 at 2:27 pm
[...] and writing code and designing interfaces that play nicely across all platforms. So, the first iteration of our Mobile Web launch was simple—hit http://www.brooklynmuseum.org on a mobile device and get [...]