As a public cultural institution created in 2011, the RMN-GP has various activities: cultural events programming, books and derivatives edition, photo agency’s animation and acquirements for national collections...  It also has an art database with no equivalent in France, and wants to make the best use of it.

CHALLENGES

The RMN-GP’s objective is to display its photo library to a large audience via a dedicated website, offering innovating functions synced with actual use. They solicited us to design and develop it in order to become the image and art data reference platform.

There were two main challenges on this mission:

• Circulating the content as broadly as possible: giving access to all audiences, whatever their art knowledge, age and digital tools practice; and promoting images sharing, especially via social networks.
• Giving context to images but also copyrights, a concept often blur for the general public.

METHODOLOGY AND OUTPUTS

We adopted an agile approach to respond to the many project challenges:

• Controlling the planning to quickly offer a service and get users feedback
• Delivering the use cases and the expected value
• Arbitrating the numerous functional stakes

For the user experience we focused on the following issues: how to discover some art, thanks to search or serendipity, but also how to build albums, which would be sort of ideal and personal museum, and share it, with accessibility in mind. 

The matter of the integration in a vast websites ecosystem, via an image player, and the sharing on social networks were also at the heart of technical and design issues.

RESULTS

The platform highlights the collections richness and is the starting point for an unlimited browsing. This aspect has been emphasized on mobile and tablet, and the artwork flow has been put forward to encourage the immediate exploration.

From the user experience perspective, we played with museums codes to recreate an online exhibition for this photo library, in which the user is the curator. The way art pieces are displayed meets different uses and profiles, from art-lover to expert with three information levels.

The platform has been publicly released at the end of 2015.