The Huntington Library

www.huntington.org

Target Audience: Visitors to the Huntington galleries and gardens, researchers interested in the Huntington library and manuscript collections, and teachers who will be planning school trips to the site.

Usefulness of Content: The Huntington is one of the cultural highlights of the greater Los Angeles area, with beautiful themed gardens, art collections, and a prestigious library only open to scholars and researchers. The content of this website is informative and useful, but unfortunately it is very poorly presented. The holdings of each art gallery are summarized, with enlargeable images of valuable pieces; photos and a description are available for each garden area; and practical considerations are detailed for potential library users. There are also numerous lesson plans available for teachers, to help them plan school activities at the Huntington.

Consistency of Design: I was really shocked by the poor design and presentation of this website, which I expected to be extremely modern and elegant, like the Getty Center’s website. It really misrepresents the quality of this institution and the beauty of the physical site. The homepage layout is cluttered and unappealing, though functional. The logo bar at the top of the page is supposed to visually represent the four areas of the Huntington via photos, but the symbolism is unclear and the general user would not even notice the links. These four portals are also located on the lower-right side of the page, with plain text and underlined links to access the categories. The pages in the art gallery are extremely long and require a lot of scrolling. The color choices for the garden pages are fluorescent and somewhat painful to the eye. There is no real consistency from section to section of the website. The “Treasures of the Huntington” page made me wince – I don’t think these valuable objects could be more poorly presented. On the positive side, some of the most recent exhibition pages are well-designed, and if this style were extended to the rest of the site, great improvement would be made.

Ease of Navigation: In spite of the poor visual design and inconsistent layout, the site remains fairly easy to navigate. Needed information is presented in fairly obvious locations, where the user would think to look. The structure is not terribly problematic, but the Huntington site desperately needs a redesign.