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The Frick Collection Lightbox: Project 3—Five Weeks
(Real-World Project, 4 Person Team)

Our team was called Love 3>oat Interactive. Our project objective was “[t]o design an online tool that allows for the exploration and organization of images of works of art (paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture etc.) taken from multiple sources (webpages, computer files, dams, etc.) in one virtual space” (Karwas, 1).

 

The traditional tool of  choice for archivist or art historian was the lightbox, where one could place several single items onto an electrical light table, reminiscent of those vertically mounted on doctor's office walls for examin–ation of X-ray, and compare and contrast those artifacts for cataloging purpusoses. Our goal was to apply this metaphor to an electronically-based web application useable within the context of the existing Frick Collection. 

Our Final Product—High Fidelity Clickable Prototype
How We Got There
User Research

Each member of the team conducted at least one interview with potential knowledgable users to get a sense of the most-wanted and required features for the lightbox web application, and see how this dovetailed with the needs of the the Frick Collection. I was tasked with writing these questions to be used as a guide in our interviews. The content of these questions may be viewed here.

 

My interviewee was Susan Chute, a longtime personal friend and colleague, formerly head of the Art and Picture Collection at the New York Public Library. She is currently archivist at the Women’s Studio Workshop.

 

A noteable observation she made is:

 

“…the most important quality of a digital asset is findability, which means the search box has to be flexible and very good. And you’re only as good as your metadata…I worked in the New York Public Library…the Picture Collection had good metadata…we described the metadata very carefully so the search terms worked.”

 

And another comment on needed application features:

 

 

"...being able to zoom in on the image...and identify [it]...[T]here are maybe fifteen methods of creating a print. Is it a lithograph, an etching...a chromogram?...Is it silkscreen? Even with photography, what kind of photographic process does the image represent? Is it a Daguerreotype...What kind of process was used to produce this photograph? [P]lus being able to examine very detailed parts of the image, almost to the point of seeing pixels, and relate them to a photographic process or a reproduction process with printing. You know, what’s the ink, how thick is the line, that kind of thing. Is it a brush stroke...?"

Whiteboard Sketches
Comparitive Analysis
User Personas
Chosen User Flows
Paper Prototypes
Site Map
User Testing
Project Booklet
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