Just happened to make a search in Europeana for Greta Garbo (link goes to the preview of our new portal). We’ve got some wonderful pictures of her indeed! Thought I’d share. Or launch a thousand ships…
I’m just testing something. Nothing to see here really! 
And now the two activitities that demanded most of my attention in Leuven. In some ways my experience was one of scurrying between the hackathon bullpen and the main plenary venue close by.
As Product Development is my main responisbility at Europeana it fell on me to arrange this session. I wanted the session to focus on best web development practices in general and to showcase some specific sites I think are at the cutting-edge in functionality and design. The topics of the presentations also needed to match the theme of the plenary which was “Connecting Society Through Culture”.
In terms of format I didn’t want a series of long presentations, but decided to split the two hours at my disposal into a first hour of three presentations and then a more interactive session comprising two sites being Web Critiqued. The format for the latter I stole shamelessly from Museums and the Web.
To speak about designing your site for the ever changing web and the unknown future I invited the Standardistas. They spoke about how the web has always been responsive and that more than ever we need to return to the basic principles of the web in order to serve our users (and their myriad of devices!) the best.
Petr Pridal presenting Old Maps Online. Photograph by myself which explains the quality.
Second up was Petr Pridal who spoke about Old Maps Online, the technology it builds on and how this map project took help from the public in getting 1000 maps geo-referenced in a couple of days. I invited Petr because Old Maps Online is the best search service for historical maps yet built. And also because he combines entrepeneurial spirit with technical insight in a way that I think is sorely needed among GLAMs.
Our third speaker was Nick Stanhope of Historypin. I invited Nick because Historypin are the best at what they do. Which is to create a web presence where photos from the public and GLAMs both can be combined to form the basis of stories and comparison between past and present. Many GLAMs attempt to do this themselves (and fail) so why not instead create a channel on Historypin?
We ended the session by having two sites, both based on content from the public, critiqued by the speakers and by the audience of the session. The two sites critiqued were Europeana 1914-1918 (represented by myself) and Platsr (represented by Maria Logothetis) and we both received a lot of constructive critique and good advice on how to improve our sites. One common critique for both sites was: Keep It Simple Stupid! We GLAMs tend to raise too high thresholds for sites to be truly participative.
Overall, I’m pleased with how the session turned out. I think the presentations were well-received and it was good to see a lot of business cards and contact information being exchanged between speakers and between speakers and audience. I dare say we haven’t seen the last of each other!
Concerning the Web Critique I was a little bit dissapointed in the low level of engagement from the audience/session participants. The form was an experiment and I think that next time I think I’ll go for something more intimate and small-scale as well as try to brief the participants better than I did this time. This was a learning experience, I’ll do better next time I think.
As we did last year we’ve organized a series of hackathons across Europe as part of the Digital Agenda. Two had already been held in Warzaw and Riga with Leuven being the final and biggest one. To get a feeling for what went on check out the last few days of Tweeting the Hack4Europe hashtag.
We had about 25 developers participating who together built an astonishing 12 prototypes! Four winners were awarded and pretty much all prototypes demos were functioning and with links to the source code. It was a great experience, good fun and I hope all developers who particiated will continue to develop their prototypes and release them into the wild! I will write more about prototypes and try to link to all of them in a follow-up post. For now though I’d like to write a little bit about the hackathon format.
The Hack4Europe bullpen in Leuven. Photo by myself.
Like many others have noted it’s probable that we’re at peak-hackathon (to borrow a phrase from the oil industry). At no time before has the format been so popular with so many hacks vying for attention. I think it’s time to review it, adapt it and move forward with something different next year.
I think one aspect to improve is to make the events more cross-disciplinary. Basically by inviting enough people to ensure that each team is a combined UX and Engineering team. For our sector in particular I also think it would make a lot of sense to add content experts and curators to the mix. I believe this would make for more of a challenge (both in organising and participating in the event) but also for the event to be more productive and an opportunity to break down some silos. As an added bonus I think it could also help in evening out the skewed gender ratio typical for most hack events.
I hope we’ll get the opportunity to try some of the changes listed above, and by others who have thought on how to improve the format, in Hack4Europe 2013! On a more personal level I wouldn’t mind doing more of a hackretreat than a hackathon…
If you have thoughts about how Europeana could improve its hackathons don’t hesitate to share them with me!
My last week was very much dominated by first preparing for and then attending our bi-annual plenary. I thought I’d share a summary and some thoughts of the event from my perspective. If that sounds boring just check out my colleague Neil’s photo-montage below and then bounce!
In the plenary programme there were two entries that were my responsibility, the hackathon and the product development session, and two were I took part, the Europeana 1914-1918 debriefing and the eCloud installation. I’ll do the latter two in this post and follow up with the first in a second (I’m highly logical that way…).
My part of the Europeana 1914-1918 was pretty much to report on the recent re-design of the site. We also discussed some possible major further developments, like e.g. to shift from the current “moderate first, publish afterwards”-model to a “publish afterwards, moderate afterwards if needed”-model. Further, we discussed making completely separate contribution forms for spontaneous online submissions and for the catloguers who facilitate during Collection Days. A third idea worth mentioning was to create a specific Expert role for historians of the First World War in order for them to be able to provide contextual information to the stories and memorabilia from the public.
I’d pretty keen on doing all of the above to be honest! Let’s hope we can shake loose some resources for it. And for some more changes based on the feedback from the Web Critique of Europeana 1914-1918 (more about that in Part II).
Since I’d missed the first time we showed the immersive 3D eCloud in Brussels I was happy to be able to catch it this time! I took some part in the design of the experience and it was satisfying to see how it had all turned out so well. It was also good to meet with Sarah Kenderdine, who’s the real brain behind the eCloud, after only having meet via mutiple Skype calls this last spring.
The eCloud In 3D, with music and in the dark it’s quite the experience!
Developing the eCloud was quite an investment for Europeana. So I hope we get to display it at more events and venues, but also that we can find a way to release the software that powers it as Open Source. That would not only fit the Europeana ethos, but would also open up the software for further and collaborative development.
Developments like e.g. changing the control of the experience from an iPad (acting as a remote control) to one of motion control via e.g. Microsoft’s Kinect. Or switching from where one person controls the experience to a multiple-controllers experience (Split-screen? Shuffling stories back and forth Minority Report-style?). Finally, the software could be developed to support more back-ends than the Europeana API thus allowing it to be used by many more GLAMs than ourselves.
I’m sure there are many other development possibilities for the eCloud. What would you like to see?
Do you remember the design principles from the introductory blog post? No worries, here they are again:
I’ll actually focus the most on that last bullet point first as it was as much a constraint as a goal. Also, since we were doing a responsive design (our chosen method for improving smartphone and tablet UX) we chose to change the process a bit. Specificallywe spent much less time on the wireframing. Instead we moved quickly from lof-fi wrireframes to designing on screen. Some of the layout ideas in the sketches and wireframes just didn’t translate well into an actual tactile/swipe-controlled experience across devices. In those cases we chose reality over the wireframe.
In comparison to our first attempt at responsive design I think we did better this time in letting the display flow from the nature of the content rather than just by establishing artificial break points. Also, we opted this time to not use one of the existing frameworks for responsive design, but rather developed a specific CSS of our own.
In terms of time, our front-end developer Dan probably spent the most time on the image carousel on the story display page. First of all getting it to interact with the user, via mouse and touch both, at different viewport widths took some work. But then we noticed in early testing that when stories consisted of dozens, sometimes even hundreds, of images the loading time at low connection speed was just prohibitive. So the image slide-show was re-factored to load three images at a time.
Loading time, despite server-side processed images served at different sizes for different viewports (and the media queries to go with them), is certainly the greatest challenge in responsible responsive design.
The search features auto-completion but the layout is meant to encourage users to explore the stories by category. The categories are represented by images. The underlying category thesaurus makes this exploration agnostic to language specific labels.
The search and explore result page is image-centric but with enough captions to not rely on the images alone. We’re certainly inspired by Pinterest here and used Masonry.js in our implementation.
The 960 pixel viewport design of a story page. Media slide-show and story take equal prominence with the layout. Note that the storyteller and the story protagonist are also in focus.
A story page at a lower viewport width. Note the change in layout of the top menu and that the story components are now stacked in a single column.
As I mentioned in the introductory blog post there were some aspects of Europeana 1914-1918 that we felt needed to improved in order to make for a better user experience for our users.
Below are some of the actions we took to accomplish this goal. The data entry forms are implemented in a fluid grid to support our responsive design BTW.
Screenshot from the storytelling form. Shown are the mandatory fields with optional fields for more detail in collapsed mode below.
In the next blog post: Designing and implementing the user experience.
Europeana 1914-1918 is perhaps my favourite Europeana project. Why? Because it’s a great project that just couldn’t have been done without us. Getting the EU-funding and having the pan-European network to then pull it off is, I think, unique to us at Europeana. The stories that the project collects are so rich in potential re-use elsewhere, like for example exhibitions and immersive installations. Not to mention how much it means to the people who come to the Collection Days to tell the story of their grandfather or great aunt and how they were impacted by the Great War. As many wise people have concluded, in crowd-sourcing the process is perhaps more important than the outcome.
The Europeana 1914-1918 eCloud splash page. Live, it’s projected in 3D on to a 9×3 meter screen.
Pity then that the old Europeana 1914-1918 site just looked so bad and interacted with the user so badly! Which is why a small Europeana team has been spending the better part of the last couple of months improving the site. This work is now done and I think it’s perhaps our best work yet.
The new design is based on design principles and goals that I set up after having analyzed the project’s goals, the content it produces and how it produced by contributors and cataloguers. As always with a re-design the legacy system was perhaps the greatest constraint, but of course the two old favourites time and money made a showing as well.
The design principles and goals that we established:
In order to accomplish all of this we pretty much rebuilt the Europeana 1914-1918 front-end from scratch and made some serious renovation work on its RunCoCo back-end. In follow up posts to this one I’ll go into a little bit more detail on how we tried to fulfill the principles and meet the goals listed above. First up some details on content modelling, editorial support and localization.
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