Once I learn a particular way of doing something it’s hard to see any other path. The other evening for example I was messing around with Shopify and found a handy feature that was right before my very own eyes. Until today if I wanted to know how well a product has sold I exported the month or year to date (YTD) sales and then searched. However Shopify has a handy “Orders” feature that lets you search sales history. Bingo a super quick way to get the same result in a fraction of the time. I has previously written that feature off. I find it difficult to override this urge to follow the path well known. I know this applies to most tasks including driving routes. I’m trying to force myself to ask “is there another way?”.
Shipping web features for winter 2017
Until you ship a product or feature its just a trello card with a wish. Shipping “things” is the aim of the game.
Performance dashboard
According to the trello card of the request dashboards have been brewing since 17 June 2016. This month the team have finally been able to launch an initial performance dashboard at https://performance.bristolmuseums.org.uk/ We aim to publicly share our performance data so that anybody can see how we’re doing. We want to share our successes and show where there is an opportunity to do better. So far for 2017-18 we’re tracking 14% up from last year with a target of 1 million or more visits across our 5 museums and our Archive.
Exhibitions online
Since I started at Bristol Culture about 4.5 years ago using the web to display our exhibitions has been a recurring dream. Thanks to Mike, Fay, Mark and Lacey this dream has come true at https://exhibitions.bristolmuseums.org.uk/#/ the point of this project was to highlight some of the key aspects of past, current and forthcoming exhibitions. We regularly get asked about past projects so this seemed a good starting point to figure out how we can tell stories in long form format. With an average reading time of 2 minutes its important to be clear and concise. During its inception originally we were comparing this style of website as being like a weekend supplement of a magazine rather than a full autobiography.
Public timeline
Internally we’ve started to attempt to improve how we visualise some of our most used data. An obvious element is “What’s on” which isn’t always easy to understand from huge spreadsheets or our standard web section https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/ so we’ve introduced a timeline feature to hopefully make it easier for people to look at on any device. Internally the timeline also includes things like room booking, install and de-rig periods and can map our KPI data over it. Nobody likes or uses data spreadsheets so i’m hopeful this is the beginning of a journey to make our data more usable for all. Hello https://d1g1t.al/#/timelinef
This work has been made possible in the large part by our own digital team who do a fantastic job under the hood of the museum and out in the galleries. Onwards.