The New Digital Gallery Beta Preview
Written on March 5, 2008 by Jennifer Anderson
We here at NYPL Labs are pleased to offer you a preview of the new Digital Gallery design, still in beta. “Beta,” in this case, means that all the functionality should be working and the new visual identity is implemented on almost every page. Among other things, we’ve eliminated tables, revised the navigation system, and rearranged the design of the detail pages.
But we’re right back to work tomorrow! Over the next couple weeks, we will adding the finishing touches—so if you notice some alignment or color that doesn’t quite match, do not be alarmed. However, please let us know if you run into any odd behavior or (gasp) bugs! After all, that’s part of our mission here at NYPL Labs: to involve our users in every level of our process, not just the shiny, polished top level.
To that end, you’ll find a link to a survey at the top of each page, and as always, you can leave comments here.
And with that, click here.
[EDIT: 3.6.08] I meant to point out that you will especially notice alignment issues on IE6. Again, do not be alarmed. We’re on it.
Filed in: Design, Digital Gallery, Usability, users.
Great job–I can see where you are headed with the redesign. The cleaner aesthetic will make for more readable content, which will make it easier for people to scan the page to find what they are looking for. I like the simplified details page and the emphasis on refining the search criteria (or finding related images). There are lots of little tweaks here and there that I can see were adopted from the usability test findings from the summer.
I know it’s still a work in progress, but I thought I’d make a couple of minor suggestions (even though I’m sure they are already on your to do list.) First, it took me a while before I realized there was navigation on the top of the page. The gray band and light text blends in with the browser window, which made it hard to notice. Second, have you considered using a sticky footer? It will pop the footer to the bottom of the browser window regardless of how much or little content you have on the page.
Again, great job–love all the work everyone’s put into it. I look forward to seeing it go live!
Wow. I’d only seen the mockup of the front page before. I love the display preferences and the non-popups of the large format images. Excellent improvements! Thanks.
Fantastic! I love anything with curly brackets! This looks great and strikes a nice balance - interactions are crisp and entertaining, but quickly drop away and let me get back to looking at the images.
Could the “results” link above the single image view be pulled out somehow? It felt a little out of place with the image manipulation tools, maybe.
And can you do just a little more with that sharp green color from the cover page? Header color? I’d love to see that come back somewhere.
I like ability to “find more images” through the checkboxes. A+!
Mostly, though, kudos on getting the focus squarely on the image. I really saw the pictures and the rest of it was “in sight but out of mind” just like well implemented navigation and metadata displays ought to be!
This is great! I know you’re going to get a ton of raving reviews, so I’ll be the friendly contrary one with the oddities and bugs for you.
Some overlapping divs in Firefox 2.0.0.12 in the Collection Guides (for instance, individual bullets partially cover each other on Collection lists, and on some pages they overflow the footer) - guessing this has to do with the text having varying heights but the divs being fixed all the same height. But you already know that. I see now in your CSS you say you’re working on it! I wonder if you could do a programmatic thing to calculate how many list items each collection has, then generate 4 lists on the fly with 1/4 of the total elements in each….Hm…..
I thought green triangle next to general search box was a submit button, but nothing happened when I clicked it. I hit enter and search worked. Should probably be clickable, especially since advanced search button is green arrow.
Font on http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital_dev/dgabout_credits.cfm gets teeny tiny at bottom, beginning with Technical Policy Advisor section. Also, not bulleted any more where previous lists are.
Text a little bunched. Could line spacing be extended slightly, just by a few pixels? Some of the more substantial text blocks got a tad hard to read.
I Like that the selected items have a different border than non-selected ones. Might be nice to make it slightly more prominent? Or change bg of the label at the bottom of selected ones?
Overall, awesome.
The “Help” in the new version offers good instructions for viewing imaging, but I have not been able to find instructions for searching. Are there plans to include tips for searching?
Although the “Advanced Search” screen addresses some of the searching issues, it does not cover everything. We should probably have something about the wildcard symbol (once we get that feature to work again), how to search for a building, what all the different numbers mean, problem with date searching, etc.
Also, the “Advanced Search” is not easy to find. Anyway to make it more visable?
And, if at all possible, can we have some more specific instructions for MAC users?
My feedback. It was nort clear to me that the Digital Gallery is different from NYPL’s Digital Collection. It was only when I went to use the survey that I realized this is a Gallery of *images*.
It would be helpful to non-NYPL folk if there were a subheading that made this explicit. The grayed out small-print is too unobtrusive to serve in this way.
Nice site!
It would nice if each image gave you citation instructions for MLA, APA, etc. (much as WorldCat.org) does. Or at least offering general guidance about how to cite images that you want to embed on your blog/web site.
Stephen - I *love* this idea. Might not make it into this release, but adding a “Cite This” functionality that could offer a few standard formats, plus of course a COINS wrapper…