
Opening up to the world online
Museums, the UN demands, should be institutions that ‘are participatory and transparent, and work in active partnership with and for diverse communities to … enhance understandings of the world.’ Websites in particular can help to meet this demand. Museum Barberini in Potsdam has recognised that. With a new website, we have opened up one of the world’s most important centres of impressionist art to a diverse audience.
Information, curiosity, scientific interest: people have different motivations for visiting a museum’s website. How does a home for art satisfy these different needs? How does a museum website complement a visit to an exhibition in a meaningful way? And how does a museum experience in the digital space become so powerful that it converts enthusiastic users into real visitors? For the Barberini, one of the most successful new museums in Germany, we have found the answers. One of those is: transparency.
Its website is as open, lively and modern as the museum itself. It is the central portal to the Barberini cosmos. Its structure guides users easily and intuitively to the content that is relevant to them. Travelling groups, families, art historians and tourists benefit from pooled information and topics. Additional content is provided by the media library. In order to create a sustainably positive user experience for the Barberini brand, we further developed the design elements of the existing corporate design for use in the digital space.
The website also facilitates access to the Potsdam-based impressionism collection of the museum’s founder, Hasso Plattner. For the first time, it has been fully documented, supplemented with accessible texts by the team of curators and combined with important art history facts that are also relevant for research.
Credits: Stan Hema was responsible for the requirements analysis, the UX and content strategy and the user interface. Our partner Systemantics designed technical solutions and implemented the front end and back end. The improved connection to the visitor management software from Giant Monkey made getting a ticket easier. The third member of the trio was Heiko Aping, who developed the Barberini CD.

- Analysis and Insights
- UX/UI Design
- Anastasiia Malkova
- Arik Hohmeyer
- Carla Westermeyer
- Dorothee Kaser
- Felix Becker
- Luisa Claudia Müller
- Salina Gandji