I'm also a web redesign survivor! (after MW09/3)

I was delighted to attend the mw09 session where four museums shared their experience of having their websites redesigned. To my surprise, the difficulties I underwent during our redesign process were almost the same (at a smaller scale, of course) as those of the big museums

(thank you Allegra, Dana, Charlotte and Joana for sharing).

I’ll point out some of the problems or difficulties we had to face and solve:

-difficulty of getting real cross-departmental engagement

-lack of understanding that Internet is a different media, with specificities of language use and multimedia resources: a web page is not a book page!

-lack of putting oneself in users’ shoes: content curator-oriented or with an intellectual approach instead of user-oriented

-lack of commitment to provide content or generate new content where none was available

-certain resistance to generously share knowledge

-few contributing with real content or ideas but too many opining about everything

-the pressure to have it “done”: the time invested was quite superior to the one foreseen. In our case, due to some technological difficulties harmonizing the content management system with freedom for creative design, but mainly due to lack of digitized images of the artworks and of reusable content: 80% of the content of the redesigned website is of new creation. 

And I also share some realizations:

-you achieve higher effectiveness to get cooperation in a face to face approach than in general meetings

-take the most out of most cooperative people and don’t worry about the non-committed

-bigger engagement in providing content or ideas came after the launching of the website (seeing the result has been encouraging for almost the totality of museum staff). 

For me, the best thing of the redesign process, besides the end result itself (of course!) was that the need of generating content brought into light some precious jewels unknown until then to the general public as well as to many of museum staff, such as reports by the Chief Restorer back in 1970 when Picasso himself donated almost one thousand works to the museum, or old photographs of the history of the museum until then “hidden” in the municipal Historical Archive or even a detailed chronology of the museum collection. 

Now we are working on the implementation of Social media (imagine how hard it will be?) 

Comments on these thoughts or on the Museu Picasso redesigned website are welcome!

You can also see the Slideshare presentation (2008) of the Museu Picasso web redesign project