The Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation presents inventions and their stories as well as American historical artifacts. It is similar to a science center in the sense that it aims to educate visitors on elements of innovation and engineering, however has a strong focus on a collection of American inventions and artifacts.

I took a look at the Henry Ford Museum’s website, a site that integrated all of the Henry Ford attractions: alongside the Museum of American Innovation, the Henry Ford runs Greenfield Village (an emulation of historic America), the Ford Rouge Factory Tour, and the ‘Giant Screen Experience.’ The resources on the website, however, mainly focus on the museum collection.

The first impression I had visiting the website was that the formatting was clean and pleasing to the eye. Links to buy tickets for all attractions were all lined up under a transitioning banner of featured exhibitions. The issue of density emerged, however, as I began exploring the site. Considering the navigation on the top of the website, the top of the page has two navigation bars and a drop-down menu with a plethora of links. To consider the Henry Ford Museum’s presentation as an attractive institution, their website is a bit overwhelming. Its layout tends to flood rather than engage, giving you ten links and articles when a visitor would be happier with just one.

The vast content on the Henry Ford website may harm the user experience, but it also holds value as resources for a wide variety of audiences. The Henry Ford website contains an extensive amount of resources for researchers, in particular their digital collections. The digital collections contain images of artifacts, and information such as their fabrication date, creators, materials, and dimensions. They also have resources for interacting with artifacts, such as videos detailing how to take care of artifacts and conservation services.

The Henry Ford outreach focuses on education, in particular teaching children about engineering and innovation. They have articles about these in-person initiatives, but also digital resources to download for the classroom. One of these is the Model i Innovation Learning Framework, which can be downloaded to a device and used to go through the design process.

Overall, the Henry Ford Museum of Innovation has a sufficient digital presence. The website contains a wide array of materials for potential visitors to explore, for researchers to study, and for students to learn in the classroom. Its layout is clean, however at times overcrowded with information and can take time to get used to before being able to fully enjoy the content.