You would expect an art museum to have a good visual design. The happy surprise with the SFMOMA website is it’s excellent usability. Not only is it clean and attractive, but very user-friendly.

Like many other web sites. SFMOMA.org has a slideshow on the homepage that features present and upcoming events. What makes it stand out is it’s cool animation effect, rather than the boring old fade, or other typical canned transition effects we have become so accustomed to seeing.  The slideshow also has a neat little feature that allows you to manually choose a slide, as well as see when the next slide is coming up.

All important information on the homepage is above the fold. Depending on  your browser and toolbar setup, you might need to scroll to see the footer at 1280 x 800 screen resolution, which I see as being the most popular resolution at the time of this writing.

Persistent global navigation is easily visible and differentiated in the design. Drop-down menus (which I’m usually not crazy about) are tastefully done. As you drill down into the site, the appropriate sub navigation from the drop-downs is presented across the top, just under the main navigation, so if you hate drop-downs, you don’t need to use them.

Information for each event is deep and presented in a tab format that gives you access to a lot of information neatly.

The SFMOMA website is a pleasure to visit, as the museum itself appears to be. Check them both out!