Blog
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Relaunching Softly: the Whitney’s Online Collection
The Whitney’s collection defines and drives much of our mission and our work. It is a unique resource, offering a lens into the historical and contemporary landscape of American art through more than 3,400 artists and 23,000 works of art. With the opening of the Whitney’s new building in 2015, nearly every work in the Museum’s collection was made available online for the first time.
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Dimensions of Museum Data
Google analytics was not built for the arts. Most of the time that’s fine: as a museum we still care about all kinds of standard metrics. Pageviews still matter, session behavior matters, referrals matter, ecommerce matters, and when we need something specific to our platform or its extensions we can usually cover it with custom event tracking or find another tool that can give us what we need. But as we’ve tried to more cohesively analyze data around our exhibitions, it’s become more and more labor intensive to identify the throughlines between content spread across different aspects of our online presence. There are a number of ways we’re working to answer this challenge, and one is through better utilizing custom dimensions.
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Understanding our audiences: The Whitney’s Website Visitor Survey and its broader context
I was part of a presentation at MCN 2018 on a visitor motivation survey (VMS) we ran on whitney.org. As a group we covered the context of motivation-based surveys at museums and some key learnings for the Whitney, both in results and in strategy.
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Answering the question “what’s on today?”
A few months ago we launched a new visit planning feature on whitney.org. Varyingly referred to internally as “Today at the Whitney” or “What’s on Today”, this feature came about after a conversation with a number of our colleagues in Visitor Services around our Plan Your Visit and Events calendar pages. They brought up how difficult it can be for visitors to get a good view “at a glance” of what all is happening at the Whitney on a given day, and wondered if there was a way we could better serve this need on whitney.org. To anyone who’s visited museums and their websites, this is likely a familiar problem.
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Experimenting with what works
A lot has changed about whitney.org over the last year. This includes the entire platform underpinning the site, and a number of major usability and user interface improvements, from reworked navigation, to new mobile experiences for audio and video, to the incorporation of outside voices in our exhibition content. And with growing distance from the complexities of launching a new website, our data-related work has been picking up steam as we’ve been able to devote more time and mindshare to it, which in turn has begun to more deeply impact our design thinking and decision making processes. A major aspect of that impact is in an increasing ability to reevaluate our assumptions, and to better understand how visitors are actually interacting with us…rather than just how we might think they are.
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How Many Hoppers?
An up to date count of the number of works by Edward Hopper currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
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“Hey could you give me the numbers on that again?”
Interning with MoMA’s Digital Media department is great. Building a dashboard to track metrics across the museum is really complicated. Both of these statements are true, which is the kind of authoritative certainty I strive for in data analytics. This summer my job has been to create a dynamic dashboard that pulls in data from sources all over MoMA, that ideally updates automatically.