Eye Filmmuseum
There are about 50 museums in Amsterdam, but Eye is one of the most recognizable. Its iconic building is visible from the harbor at Central Station. As a write this, they're preparing to receive Queen Máxima to celebrate the museum's 75th anniversary. It's a cultural center, cinema, restaurant, place of research and an exhibition space. Every day they screen digital and analog films. Their collection center contains an archive of over 50,000 films, along with posters and projection equipment. Eye plays an important role in promoting the film industry, both nationally and abroad.
Multiple audiences, one homepage
What does Eye do? I'd begin with film and soon find myself saying, "and they also do this other thing." The old homepage had the same complex. Instead of focusing on one goal and doing it well, the homepage served more as a directory of everything the museum had on offer, organized by departments.
After interviewing stakeholders, it became clear that everyone felt their content was buried and inaccessible, and the homepage lacked urgency. Marketing Director Marjolijn Bronkhuyzen put the challenge this way: why should I go to Eye today, and not tomorrow? Why Eye, and not to an ordinary cinema?
The redesign of the homepage was a radical shift. To emphasize Eye as a museum and not a film house, we put exhibitions and thematic programming on center stage. The agenda was in view and just one click away, and we distinguished ordinary screenings from those with interviews or Q&As. We also invested a lot of time into designing flexible landing pages to cover the many other aspects of the organization that couldn't fit on the homepage, knowing a lot of traffic would come through organic search.
Integrating with existing systems
The daily programming is incredibly rich with data. Director, actors, trailers, film stills, posters, reviews, length, subtitles, languages, film format -- and everything programmed at Eye has a unique description, written by their staff in the context of a given film program. I'm still in awe at the amount of care and detail their team puts into these pages. If the same film is shown twice under two different film programs, it has two different descriptions. This makes the archive of past programming a treasure trove.
Entrance to Eye. Photo by Huub Zeeman.
A film page is composed of several data sources. Ticketing data comes from one system, and data about films and their showings comes from another. Web editors can then enrich generated pages with additional images and texts within the CMS. That is to say not everything is done within the content management system. The same ticketing system used by the website is also used at the balie, and the data source for daily programming shown on the narrowcasting screens uses the same system as the website. One the challenges of designing the information architecture was to separate concerns while allowing for a rich presentation on the website.
From Lead Developer to Product Owner
I began the project to redevelop Eye's corporate website as their lead developer. I participated in workshops with stakeholders to gather requirements and determine our online strategy. My role was to find the right technical solution to fit wide-ranging goals and pre-existing requirements. Dozens of people from independently operating teams produce content every day that ends up on the website. Exhibitions, film programming, education, collections, university research, the restaurant -- how would we fit everything under one roof?
Creating a website for such a diverse organization, with more than 180 employees and dozens of volunteers, required an outsider's perspective. We decided to look for a digital agency to design and develop the site, and my role shifted from developer to project leader / product owner. I reached out to my favorite bureaus and briefed them on the project. I organized presentations to stakeholders, collected feedback, and we made a decision. Bravoure was selected as our digital partner, and they did not disappoint.
Bravoure nailed it
Bravoure was a perfect fit for Eye. They had broad experience in the cultural sector, were excellent listeners, and showed strong leadership. The complexities and nuances of the organization were taken into account into every solution they designed. They distilled our strategies into principles so we had something to fall back on when it difficult decisions had to be made. What would be on the homepage? How would we structure our navigation? How we account for those decisions to stakeholders who didn't always agree with one another?
The homepage is a unique two paneled design. The first view is a selection of highlights for exhibitions, film programs and conferences. The second panel shows the daily agenda, which is where a lot of our energy was put into. The difficulty was to organize the calendar in such a way that unique events or showings were highlighted without cluttering the interface with elements that competed for the user's attention. Bravoure anchored the content to a left-aligned reading line, and kept variations in typography to a minimum. This helped us maintain the scanability of the page without over-simplifying the data.