The Process
I concentrated on researching museums as a concept since I was already familiar with the particulars of LILAC as a former volunteer. Unstructured interviews were conducted with a museum educator and two self-professed regular museum-goers to gain their understanding on museum visitors, i.e. my users, and their conception of the function of museums, with an emphasis on historical museums.
A key finding showed that despite the copious content that museums provide, visitors often browse and look at only what catches their eye. Visitors check whether topics that they already have an interest in are present, and then from there discover other topics of interest. Exploration, already important for a museum rooted in its physical space, became the underlying theme for my website design.
After producing a domain map, I used this to create a site map of the content pages and to explore different options for the nav. The Museum of the Home, Imperial War Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art were also referenced in organizing visit and administrative information.
In particular, I would like to highlight:
- A card sort was conducted to test the use of nautical terminology.
- Labeling was a major challenge! Understanding the labels needed to be balanced that with the goal of educating the user.
- A tree-test was conducted to inform the site hierarchy and groupings. It was particularly helpful for organizing the About Us pages.
- Cross-links are a big component of site navigation but as they are too messy to include on the sitemap, they are omitted here.
I started designing from the lowest-level content page upwards. Since a museum’s site “mainly acts as 'brochure' ... which primarily is supposed to attract people to visiting the 'physical' museum” (according to Van Welie), the site content is only highlights potential topics of interest and provides visit information. As the focus was on information architecture, these wireframes are fairly lo-fi.
Evaluations with were conducted as moderated thinkalouds with both findability and discoverability task scenarios, along with targeted questions about the geographic content page and artifact listings. Two tests were conducted in person and one was conducted remotely. Participants were museum visitors, had a basic knowledge of American history, but had very little knowledge about ships. It would be beneficial to conduct future evaluations with users with no knowledge of American history. Task order was rearranged per participant to account for potential learnings during the task.
Users displayed a willingness to browse, sometimes in spite of their uncertainty around certain labels. The tests showed that more consideration was needed around labeling and particularly around the artifacts section, and prompted reformatting the layout and revising the site copy.
The evaluations also captured successes—the timeline classification within the History page was very suitable for someone was looking for a particular event or time period, and participants also interacted with related links within the narrative content page and the thumbnails for exploring the Upper Deck without any prompting, so the underlying goal of exploration was met.