Oral History of Museum Computing: Marty Spellerberg
This oral history of museum computing is provided by Marty Spellerberg, and was recorded on the 5th of February, 2021, by Paul Marty and Kathy Jones. It is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC-BY), which allows for unrestricted reuse provided that appropriate credit is given to the original source. For the recording of this oral history, please see https://youtu.be/FO4Ty-La2Yk.
I start counting my museum focus from [working at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2008]. I had, I guess I would say, been doing websites since I was a teenager. I went to art school and I tried to do websites in school, but you couldn’t really, so I did integrated media. Of what they had, that was closest.
Coming out of school, I was approached by a gallery to show my web work in the gallery, and so we tried it. It felt so weird. So I ended up saying, “Well, can I put something on the gallery website?” They said, “Sure.” And then eventually I just started updating the gallery website. I was like, “This feels right. This feels like a good place for me.” That was coming right out of college, so that sort of began a thread of work.
I ended up at the Toronto International Film Festival for a year [2007], and that was like this hothouse environment where you just work all the time to get the festival out, it was really a lot of fun, but kind of a burnout place. They kind of count on that. It’s just the culture of a film festival. From there I applied to an opening at the Art Gallery of Ontario. At the film festival, when I first got there, there was no such thing as a content management system, and so during my year there, that was something that I worked on. I was like, “Guys, there’s got to be a way, we can do this,” you know? And so, we built a content management system.
And then, when I interviewed at the Art Gallery of Ontario, that’s exactly where they were at, their headspace was at. They were like, they didn’t have [a content management system], they wanted one, I was talking about one, and they were like, “Okay, you can come work here.” So that was that…
[The Art Gallery of Ontario had] been closed. They were doing this expansion, with a new Frank Gehry remodel of the building, and they hired the web team a year out from the reopening. And I was on the internal team. It was me and my colleague, and a boss, and we worked on that for the year.
I’ll tell this story! We were working with an outside agency that had been chosen, and we were facilitating with them and this crazy thing happened where the outside agency, they heard what we wanted, and they said, “Okay, well, we think that there’s this developer, who we want to bring on to work with you guys.” And so we were working with this developer, and he was building out the CMS implementation, and he had it on his local machine — all his work — and um, he disappeared! Like, he just disappeared one day.
We didn’t hear from him. He didn’t show up for a meeting. We called the agency, we were like, “Hey, do you know where this guy is?” They said no. The agency called around. They said they called, like, his family and stuff. No one ever found him. And no one ever found the code either! It completely threw off our timelines. That was a scramble for [the agency]. They were now in a bad spot because they were way behind [on time] and budget.
What we ended up doing… the internal team ended up taking… We had to launch. The building was reopening, right? The public was… all eyes were on this thing. We ended up just taking the design that we’d been working on, and applying it to all our old stuff. We just applied the design.
Everybody was like, “Yay! A new website!”
It wasn’t really the new website, but it looked like a new website. And when the agency finally got around to… you know, ‘cause they were so far behind in their work, that when they finally got around to delivering the work the new back end, we just sort of like quietly put that in, and then that was that. But, that experience really influenced how I approach my work, and my work when I was building out projects.
I was at the AGO for, I think, three years and, by the end of three years, all of the projects that we’d started when I initially started were kind of finished, and we were kind of looking at a new [challenges]. I was looking at what was on the plate for the next couple of years, and it was all new stuff, and I thought, “Okay, this is a good moment to, you know, to do [something new].” I was looking for like a lifestyle change, I was living in Toronto, and I was really inspired by Nina Simon. This is before she was [director of the] Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History. She was a consultant, and a writer [of the book, the Participatory Museum], and she had come and given a presentation.
It was the dead of winter in Toronto. She comes, and she’s tan, you know, and she shows this slide in her presentation. And she’s like, “Yeah, I live in the mountains, and I live in a tree house.” And she shows this photo of like, outside, the top of the trees and she’s like, “Yeah, I was working on this presentation, and this is the view.”
And I was like, “Oh my God!” You know? And she was such an inspiration in, like, you can do this work in a different way,” like in a different lifestyle-point of view. So, I left Toronto. I moved down here to Austin.
I have family here. The sun shines here. And that’s what I was looking for. And I didn’t know at first, what kind of work I was going to do. I came out just to, you know, get a reset. But I was fortunate to be able to continue to do this kind of museum work as an independent freelancer.
Nina Simon ended up becoming the Executive Director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and she put out this call. She said, “I need a web developer.” And I said, “I’ll do it!” And well, she didn’t really remember me, I think, from the presentation [in Toronto], because she meets so many people when she is consulting, but of course, I remembered her, and told her the story of what had happened, my approach to websites, and being very iterative and collaborative with the internal team and my whole story about being very risk-averse. That was kind of this track that came out of that experience. She was totally into that, or, well, into it enough to say yes to me, I suppose, and so I started working for her on their website.
And I worked, I worked on that website the entire time that she was the executive director there, and when she left, they handed it to an agency right there in Santa Cruz, and that makes a lot of sense.
I was thinking of talking [to you] about the Visitor Motivation Project. The Visitor Motivation Survey from a few years ago, because it touches a few different institutions, and I thought that might that might be a bit fun.
This project starts at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The way I started working with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago [was through someone] I knew from my high school days. I used to be in, like, an online web design club, and a bunch of us went on to become web developers as our job. I was friends with someone from those days who happened to be the web developer at MCA Chicago and he was miserable in his job, and whenever I was in Chicago, we’d get together and we have beers and he would tell me about how miserable he was, which I guess is not really relevant to the story, except for one day, he quit. He was like, “That’s it! Enough! Enough of that for me.” And so then, he recommended I get in touch with them, and so I started with the MCA Chicago. It was meant to be a temporary thing, just while they found somebody, but that’s when I met Sarah Wambold. She was the, I guess, manager of digital at that, at that point. She later got a promotion, and she’s been like a very close creative collaborator ever since. That’s how I met her.
Anyway, so the VMS: She had seen a presentation at, I think MW, a Visitor Motivation Study created by the IMA Lab, and she was really impressed by that study. It was a survey that would pop up and say, you know, “Why’d you come to the website today?” And she showed me this, and she said, “We should do this! We should do this study. We should do one of these.”
[Sarah] knew Grey Bowman at the IMA lab, and he very generously shared their source code with us and shared their technique, which was about tagging Google Analytics with a custom segment. We ran the same study [at the MCA Chicago] that they ran [at IMA] with the same questions and we did a report from that. And, it was pretty good.
Okay, now switch back over to Santa Cruz. At the same time, I’m working for Santa Cruz, and Santa Cruz says, well, we need to make the website responsive, right? It wasn’t responsive. We need to put in responsive design, so I started researching that and I read the book called Mobile First. It said that you’ve got to figure out what your key actions are. Your visitors — what are the key actions that they’re trying to accomplish when they get to your site? Because in a small screen, you want to you want to surface those. That’s what they’re trying to do, so, you want to surface those. I was like, Okay! Key actions.
So, then I thought Okay, well, we need to know more about our audiences. We probably need to develop some personas. And it was either at MCN or MW earlier that year I’d seen, I think it was a lightning talk by Ahree Lee. She was at the Getty at that time, and I remembered this presentation. I was like, “Oh, that’s great.”
I reached out to her, and I said, “Hey, would you give your presentation to the team — myself and my colleagues at the Santa Cruz MAH — and I was working with Elise Granata, who was the engagement, marketing and engagement person. And she said, “Sure, absolutely!” So, [Ahree] gave that presentation, and was very generous with her time, and at the end of that presentation, she mentioned, “You know, if you’re really interested in visitor motivation, you need to read John Falk’s book.” And Elise was like, “Oh yeah! I have that book right here!” And she pulled it off her desk, and said, “Yeah, Nina gave me this when I started the job. Nina said read this.”
I said oh, Okay, I need to read this book, right? So, I ordered a copy of the book and, of course, it says on Amazon, it says, “frequently often bought with…” Nina Simon’s book right, you know, which I had already read. [When] I read John Falk’s book, I was like, I was like, “Oh, this is gold! This is this is solid gold right here!”
I distinctly remember calling Sarah Wambold, who at that point had moved from the MCA Chicago to the Clifford Still Museum in Denver… I think I said we could redo the Visitor Motivation Study, but instead of the questions that we asked before, we could ask questions based on these motivations in this book. And she was like, “That’s fantastic.” And I think I said we could do this on the Clifford Still Museum website, but, she said, “Yeah, we could do it on the Clifford Still Museum website, but, we’ve been meeting all these people at these conferences we’ve been going to. Why don’t we ask them if they want to do it too?” And I said, “Okay, let’s do that!”
And so we did that, and we ended up with 24 institutions doing it. [We] learned a lot about why people use museum websites. I’d been doing museum websites for like 10 years by that point, maybe a little bit less. But in doing that study, I realized maybe I’d been doing it all wrong. You know?
I [had] focused on the wrong people. I was focused on the museum, I wasn’t focused on the users! Up to that point, I had thought of museum websites as… there’s all these constituents within the museum, and they all have these wonderful programs, and we got to get them up there [on the website]. But that doing [the survey] really changed my perspective, from being focused internally on, “What would you guys like to see on the website?” to really looking outside.
So, let’s see… so, just to wrap that up, we ended up doing a personas-based homepage for the Santa Cruz MAH. We ended up changing the Clifford Still Museum homepage to really present a much more social image. We realized that we’d be, we’d be presenting a lot of photographs of empty galleries, and according to Falk’s framework that is not the [best] way.
We [presented the study] at MCN one year. We got a bunch of the study participants and did this, like, hour of basically lightning talks where different study participants talked about: How they used [their findings], what they learned from the study, and what and how they implemented it. What it meant for their institutions, and each one kind of took a different, you know, it was different for each one.
So, anyway, I got the bug for doing these studies, and then, when COVID hit, last year, I, like, everyone, was freaking out, you know, just trying to make sense of the world. I had already been thinking about doing another study, I had enjoyed that process, so much. So, when COVID hit last year, that’s when I spun up another one, a simpler one. It was just to look at website traffic data. I didn’t have as much of a theoretical base, like the other one did, like the Falk one did. But, we presented on that last season, and now we’re doing one about virtual events.
Also, another little coda is I ended up doing some… I remember when John Falk got in touch after we did that study. I was thrilled! I mean, that he’s a living person who writes you emails! Like, to me, he was like, he was this idea, right? But he’s actually a person, and he wrote a very nice email, and then I ended up doing some work for him, doing graphics and on [his company’s] website, and that was a real thrill and a real pleasure.
[Marty]: Sorry, I really don’t want to jump in, but I need to explain why I’m grinning from ear to ear, because just yesterday in my usability analysis class here at FSU, I gave my lecture on why personas are so important when doing website design. Yeah, I mean it’s just wonderful to hear you talking about that experience of using personas. It’s exactly what I was saying to my students yesterday. Shoot! I wish I had had you there to tell them what you just said.
I’d be happy to, and they should all read Falk’s book.
[Marty]: I usually don’t assign that to my usability students, but I do give it to my museum students…
Yeah! I mean, like I say, I realized after doing that study that… I have this idea that: Most museum websites, the way they’re normally designed, we surface all the stuff that’s going on in the museum, and because it’s all great, it works! Well, kind of it works well enough. People go there and they say, they think, “Oh, this exhibition looks cool, this talk looks cool, right? But to my view, we’re making the audience do work that we should be doing. We’re making them… they have to make the association between the program that we’re presenting, which is a great program, but they have to make the association of how that’s relevant to their life.
And, the only reason we get away with it is because our programs are so are compelling. They’re all great. But, really, we should be taking on that burden and we should be, we should be understanding what’s going on in their life, what they’re motivated by, and presenting our offerings as fulfillment of their, of their needs, and we should be doing that mental work so that, when they look at what we’re offering, it’s clear to them. It’s obvious. I mean we’ve done that. We’ve said, this is how this is, if you’re looking for a social activity, the museum’s a great place. We should show [our relevance to visitor’s lives] in the way we do our design, and in the way we present our programs, the imagery that we bring forward, the photography that we use.
If you’re the kind of person who’s trying to do all the best stuff in town, we’re the place for that. Or if, if you want to come and recharge over your lunch break, we’re the place for that. But we should do that mental work — that cognitive work — so that the visitor doesn’t have to.
[Jones]: So, I want to jump in too on that, and you know I love that perspective of taking John Falk’s work and letting that be the framework for how you design a website. In my experience, I haven’t heard anybody say that before, so I think it’s really great, but what you just said about doing the work for the visitor… Have you also read George Hein’s work on constructivism?
I will write it down.
[Jones]: It might be something, because one of the things that he talks about is making meaning and that when visitors come to the museum, they come in with their whole lives behind them, but then you’re giving them a new and fresh experience to weave into that life experience, so that they come out with something very different. And I mean, I really do love the way that you’re thinking about how a website can be developed, so I won’t say too much more, but one of the things that I do want to say is that often, even though we’re trying to break down silos and museums, we don’t really and, if we use an outsourced web designer who has no museum experience who never, you know, kind of lived the life in the museum, they’re not going to get it, the way that you did, and I just looked at the Clifford Still [Museum] website and it totally shows me the type of inclusion that I think you were striving for, so just… yeah, sorry.
I should clarify something about the current Clifford Still website…
[Jones]: Oh, you didn’t do it.
They changed it last year. My engagement finished and they changed it.
[Jones]: Well, but maybe you gave them food for thought about what to do.
[…]
[Marty]: And I just have to say that I’ve heard so many stories about people who lost data or lost systems, right, because of a crash… I don’t think I’ve ever heard a story about somebody who just disappeared.
[Jones]: No, I haven’t either. That’s totally strange.
I know, I know, and it was… there’s little things that I still do that are inspired by that, like, I mean that was we didn’t have Github, of course, back then, so that would have solved the problem.
I also wonder what he was work– I mean, what he was working on. He was a very creative developer. He had a concept for… Like, they had brought him in because he — we described what we wanted, and they said, “We think this guy…”
You know, but I guess I don’t know what was going on with him in his personal life, but… but there’s still little things. Like, I like to make a Github account for the institution if they don’t have one already, and I like to just work there and deliver code there because, like yeah, what if I got hit by a bus or something? And I wouldn’t want to subject the people who came after me to being like, “Well, we don’t know. We don’t have the source code.”
It was a real problem for the agency to because they had to — they had to put developers who were not… who didn’t understand the other guy’s work. Like, the product we got… It didn’t have what he was trying to do with it, because it was not documented.
Also, I’ll say one other thing now that it’s all coming back: We had spent so long speccing that thing out. We spent the entire summer in these meetings where we would discuss what we wanted, and we had these really lengthy spec documents. When it came down to it, and we lost all that code, the spec documents didn’t do us any good at all because we had to… The museum was opening, you know? We needed to launch a website and you can’t launch a spec — they were all just, you know, wishes. We were all wishful thinking. That influenced me, especially early on, after that, to be very iterative and do, to not [spec].
I’ll mentioned another and maybe you’ve read this book. This was from when I was at when I was at the film festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, I became kind of interested in project management, and I started reading a lot more about project management, and first I bought a book on project management [published by O’Reilly Media], and it was pretty standard stuff, but it kept on referencing Extreme Programming Explained, by Kent Beck. I read Extreme Programming Explained and I was like, oh, this is it! This is the way to do it. It was like agile before agile had more around it. Suffice to say that that really influenced my approach, after that, after doing all that [waterfall-style] planning.
Build the website out. Get it to… get it to a place where you can — and this is this came straight from agile — get into a place where you could conceivably launch it, as is. No matter what else you want, what you desire for the website to have, have your working copy be launchable because — What if you needed to launch it? And then iterate on it and improve it.
[Reading a prompt in the chat] Key man insurance, what’s… what’s key man insurance?
[Jones]: It’s what Github does for you now… I’ll make it quick. So in the early days of MCN when MCN was a software vendor, if you will, they had to have “key man insurance” for Jack Heller so that, if anything happened to Jack, there would be enough money to recreate what he had done.
Hmm, yeah exactly, right.
[Jones]: I’m sure he kept the code in an archive too, but still right, it was interesting.
[Marty]: I like this focus on iterative design, right. I teach our usability, our UX courses for our undergraduate information technology program here, and I can tell you it’s sometimes hard to get buy-in from our I.T. students that that is so important, taking that iterative approach. How have you sold that to the museums, that you work with?
Well, I think, when I talked about it. I, and I explicitly did this, when I was first introducing myself to Nina in Santa Cruz, because it was so fresh, for me, then, it was still just the last experience I had had, as a form of risk mitigation, I sort of said, why take an unnecessary risk? And you know, and telling a story of a project gone horribly wrong, or, you know, maybe not wrong, but pear shaped, not as planned, that that goes a long way.
A way that that often manifests now is, often they’ll want to do a platform change and redesign together. You know, that’s often like, “Oh, we don’t like our platform. We want to change platforms and we also want to, you know, redesign the site.” I’ll often split those into two, where we’ll do the platform change first with the existing site.
It often solves a major problem. They’re often having problems with their platform and that’s why they undertake a redesign in the first place. And then, and then we’re basing the redesign [and] everything we have on our platform, we can iterate from there, we can do the design iteratively. We can push the design towards our desired information architecture, our desired aesthetic, but we now know that we have built a new website that will at least do everything the old website did because it’s built on top of the old website, and conceivably could be launched at the drop of a hat. Say, Okay, we got it, we got to stop. We’ve got to launch this thing.
The public doesn’t know all the things that you wanted to do with your website that you didn’t get around to doing. If you tie it all up together and you can’t launch the thing until you’ve completed all of those items, then you don’t have that option of putting the site out when you need to. Then you have this, this spec document [and] you’re kind of stuck to it.
So yeah, I just kind of tell people it’s my process, and they kind of go for it. I think I think I used to be a lot more explicit about it, but now that it’s been a number of years, I don’t. It’s not as raw for me, so I don’t I don’t lead with it, but it still influences my process.
[Marty]: And I would also say right that one of the nice things about doing the platform change first in that example, is that you, you get a better understanding of what the new features and functionalities are before you get into the redesign, right? What if you do both at the same time and realize there was some opportunity you had missed, right?
Right – and, well, you know, right, and even if you’re really thinking, “Well, our content strategy isn’t working, we need to change out our content strategy.” You know there’s so much of it is you know there’s just all these like all this stuff that people in the museum depend on, you know, all their input forms working and databases sort of deep in the bowels of the site that, you know, maybe they don’t get a lot of attention, but they have to be there. And so, you clear out that work and then what’s left is the stuff that you kind of want to, you know, the stuff you want to focus on, but you know that it’s there.
This was the thing that happened at the, at the film festival: We missed a deadline. Our team missed a deadline, because we needed to put in all, all the copy. We had all the content, in Word. Pre-sales were supposed to go live, and we had the system done, but we didn’t have the copy in it. And we just had to scramble to put all the copy in it, and you know that was… you just want to, you know learn from those situations and try to build systems around, you know, not making new mistakes, not make the same mistakes over and over and over again.
[Marty]: Well, and I think now we’re back to the value of MCN and Museums and the Web… in fact, I think I once gave a Lightning Talk on this topic at Museums and the Web: the challenges of how do we stop making the same mistakes over and over again, which is hard to do, right?
I think agile is such a… it’s, it’s a well-known methodology, and I have to say it’s either that I could learn a few things from the practitioners who are coming in now and, and you know really adopting a full agile process, and, you know, I I haven’t had the… you know, I came to, I came upon my process from my own experience, but I know, for a lot of software development, that’s how it’s done these days.
[Jones]: Could you say a little bit more about the virtual event project that you’re doing now, and when you might publish that?
Yeah, so it we’re doing it now. Right now, we are building up the cohort and working on our survey instrument. This came directly out of a MCN SIG conversation from last season. There was a thread about KPIs and how to measure success of virtual events and there was a call. Someone in the chat said it would be useful to be able to compare KPIs across institutions. And, I immediately thought well, my team, we know how to do that. I have a researcher working with me. Her name is Grace Poole. She came on last summer to work on the COVID research. I don’t know who it was that said that in the chat – but, I thought, “Oh, we could probably do that. We know how to coordinate these things. Or, whether we do it right or not, we have some experience with it.” So, the next day, I went on the chat or I went back on the boards and I said, if people want to do this, we’d be happy to coordinate it.
So, we are working on the cohort now, and please spread the word, you know, the larger the cohort, the better the research. We have the basis of our survey instrument. Well, there’s the, there’s the initial idea for the thing and now there’s a second idea that we might be adding. The initial idea is that if we give just give [participants] a spreadsheet that says what was, you know, what were your events in 2020 and there’s a tab for 2021. There’s a tab to just fill in rows of like, when was it? And all the attributes: How many people came? What was the goal of the event? What medium was it? Was it ticketed? Was it RSVP? People would just fill it in. I think for 2020, they’ll fill it in for whatever they’ve got and for 2021, they can, you know, they can use this. And then we’ll just chart it out. We’ll see, we’ll see what, we’ll see, we’ll look for patterns. I don’t know that we have so much of a hypothesis other than that we will find patterns.
And then the second aspect that is sort of, sort of bubbling up from it is we might do something about a post-visit. I think people have been doing post-visit surveys, so that’s something we might add as a sort of a second piece, an optional piece if people want to do that. With everybody asking the same questions in post-visit surveys, then maybe we can draw some conclusions from looking at those in aggregate. Right now we’re still accepting people. It’s open to everyone, anyone who hears about it, and wants to do it, and, it’s, yes, filling in these spreadsheets and then we’re going to look at them and maybe we’ll talk to some people, kind of like you’re doing now. People who seem to have some interesting returns.
[Jones]: Could you share the link with us for that?
Sarah [Wambold] and I wrote a paper for [the Visitor Motivation Study]. That was a great experience. I remember Sarah kind of having to twist my arm to write the paper, and I was like, “Look, Sarah, we’re so busy.” And she’s like, “No, we gotta write this paper!” But that was great because now we have this thing that we can send around. And so, I intend to write a paper. I thought we would we would do one about what we learned last year, but then this new opportunity came up to do the virtual events, so we’re I guess we’re going to just do this and then when the time seems right, maybe write up something that maybe incorporates both. I’m not sure. We’ll see.
[Marty]: I’ve also really pleased to learn that you designed the Santa Cruz Museum website. You know, it’s funny because in my Museum Informatics class, when I do the lecture on the participatory museum, that’s the first slide I show them, right, so…
And, well, again that one, the way it is now is not the one that I did back then. It’s changed since.
Oh, this is to finish up on the [Visitor Motivation Study]… The crew at the Warhol had taken part in the [Visitor Motivation] study before they initiated their redesign. They were “all in” on that. Their results on the [Visitor Motivation] study came back with facilitators… the idea that people are coming for a social experience. When we redesigned that site, we did it fully informed by that. We did a lot of user or a lot of personas. We had the VMS, and then personas. We did all that. And so that was a site that was very, very focused on the idea of presenting the experience that you would have [at the museum]. That was, that was a conclusion we drew from their user research. We wanted to show the experience of being at the museum. It was also a response to: We couldn’t foreground Andy Warhol artwork like you might want to in a situation like that, due the licensing restrictions, so we said, okay, we’re not going to foreground the artwork, we – and actually, we wouldn’t want to — because we want to foreground the experience, so we really designed that website around the experience. One of the things we did, we had all the photography redone.
You know, Nina had a rule in Santa Cruz, that in order for a photo to make it on the homepage, it had to show happy people. It was a community museum, we wanted to show the community, and that’s something that we’ve, we’ve continued on. When we, when we did that homepage for them, which was a part of that story – I’ve sort of jumped around a little bit — but we did that homepage for them, the result was that we identified these audiences that they serve. And in order for a program that the museum was doing to be featured on the homepage, we had to make an association with the serving of an audience. We had the audiences defined in the CMS and you’d say, which programs do we want to highlight that serve this audience? We would have a key statement that would call out that we serve this audience, and then the programs would be used as evidence. So, if you identify with that audience, you might click through and be interested in one of those programs. We kind of took that further with the Warhol, where the whole homepage, was what we called it internally was “The Warhol Experience,” and you know, museum programming only appeared on that page a couple of places. And it would appear in support of the idea of the museum experience, [or] as illustrative of the museum experience. Of course, we had to change it with COVID because it was designed around 100 percent facilitating in-person visitation, and there was none, right? The homepage that is there now, it doesn’t exactly reflect — though a lot of the photography that you still see on that site is from that era, or from that redesign. So you know photos of, not just the galleries, but people in the galleries, so that you can identify, you can see that person doing that, and you say oh that’s what I want to do. That’s the venue for this thing that I want to do in my own life.
There’s some new work coming on that site, so it’s going to change too. That’s what websites do: You build them and they last few years and then, [you] change them.
[Marty]: You know, this focus on profiles and personas and building websites around the visitor reminds me of a conversation I have with a web developer at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate. What’s his name? Chad? Chad [Wollerton]? I’ll have to look it up, this must have been ten years ago… But one of the things we were talking about was how he knew from Google Analytics that he could divide his website visitors into two extremely distinct categories that didn’t overlap at all: People researching Thomas Jefferson, and people who are planning a trip to Monticello – and one of the things that he had always wanted to do was design two different versions of his website, and just direct them to whichever one, yeah.
Yeah, we’ve talked about that. We did talk about that with the Warhol, and we thought that we might end up doing a second site. Their vision at that time was articulated as, we want to be the number one destination for experiencing Warhol and we also want to be the number one destination online for learning about Warhol. So, that was exactly what you’re talking about.
Just to say something about the COVID research from last year. I think of it is giving us a window into our non-visitor… We asked everybody what their strategy was for their website, and just about everybody said, you know, to support visitation. And when COVID hit, there was no more visitation. In my reading of that of the results of that, you can really see, you can really see the limits of that focus on visitation. I think the last year has been a view on the people who aren’t planning a visit. Like, if we clear out everybody who is planning a visit, who is most of the people, we now get this view of people who are not planning to visit. And maybe the lessons, if we look back at this last year of analytics, if we could draw lessons or conclusions on, on how to serve that online audience…
Here’s a little tidbit. The Met. This is just what I understand from what I was told. Someone from there could say that this is not quite right, but my understanding is that they have, The Met in New York, has two digital teams, and one is focused on facilitating the visitor experience. And one is focused on people — they think of themselves as a global institution, serving a global online audience — and that’s the [focus of the] second team. They don’t think [the audience they serve is] ever going to come to the museum. And I think that’s interesting. Not everybody can have two teams. Most [institutions] can barely have one person, but it’s a way to think about to think about your audiences. If one of your personas is they’re not going to visit but they’re here to do research, you know, in one way or another.
[Marty]: And here we’re back to reinventing the wheel too, right, because late 1990s, paper after paper, “you have to support the people who aren’t going to visit.” All throughout the 2000s, I wrote quite a few of them making the same argument, but as you say, when you go and talk to people in the museum… “What’s the audience you’re supporting? The people who are going to visit.” But what about all these other people?
Right, and there’s some been some really great conversations this year about, you know, being… you know these real questions about, okay well, what do we do? What’s the business proposition for these people? Because digital is expensive to do, or can be expensive to do. There’ve been these interesting conversations, and I think we’re all following them.
[Marty]: One of the things that we can connect this to as well is, you know, the Smithsonian’s Strategic Plan, where they’re trying to reach a billion people a year, right? Obviously, they don’t mean a billion people traveling to D.C. They mean knowing and having a connection to a billion people around the world.
Right. It’s been, of course, an interesting year.
Okay, I’ll just say one other thing about what I’ve taken from the John Falk study and then this this COVID research. I’ll just, I’ll just put this out there: I don’t think exhibitions are as important as, as everybody thinks thinks they are.
I don’t think the people who are visiting the museum, who are planning to visit… I think the exhibitions are one aspect of what they’re looking for when they’re trying to plan out their visit. For some people, it might be more than others, but I don’t know that, the exhibition is the thing. And for the people who are, who are online only, I don’t know. I say this as a someone if you were going to build digital products around an exhibition, this is okay, this is just, this is just me pontificating on this, but, if you’re going to build quality, I don’t know that I would want to focus my digital efforts around my exhibition schedule, because I don’t know that that serves people who are trying to plan a visit. I’m not sure that that’s what they’re looking for is digital doodads, really cool digital things, I think they’re kind of just wanting to plan a visit, and they want to know what’s on.
I don’t want to get too, too far in front of my skis here but, for online only people, I don’t know that the exhibition schedule, which is like four to six months, whatever, is enough time to do the kind of quality… and to make these investments in a quality digital program that is really going to serve the online-only audience. So I might decouple those and I might say if we’re going to do something for online, let’s really look at what’s going to be a lasting piece that we can create that’s going to be really have value for, for a number of years and the return on the investment of all the work that’s going to go into it, and, and do as much around… This is, this could be something to study, actually, I think this if I could think of a way to study this, I would like to study this.