We reveal how Blenderbox made arts charity website Mellon.org more usable.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation supports humanities and the arts. Its redesigned site is nicely responsive, and although it could benefit from a little more image optimisation to improve load time, the layout and content is pleasingly simple and clear.
The Grants Database page searches 45 years of grants. Blenderbox's Jason Jefferies says, "To mitigate the performance issues, we cached popular queries and worked with the client to identify appropriate sets of years, to limit results."
This led to a very smart consideration of form: where desktop users are shown an interactive map displaying where the Foundation's money is spent globally, mobile users are redirected to the Advanced Search page, a more fitting method of input for smaller screens.
This redesign pays a lot of attention to usability. Text is nicely laid out with an emphasis on focus, and search is used cleverly to get users to what they’re looking for quickly. It’s a site that knows why its visitors are there, and gives them what they want with ease.
Peter Gasston is a veteran web developer who now works as a technologist and frontend lead at rehabstudio. He’s the author of The Book of CSS3 and The Modern Web.
