Research Project
How can museums make collection APIs more user-friendly?
Table of Contents
Background
As audiences are increasingly seeking digital offerings (accelerated by the pandemic), museums are investigating adapting and refocusing their ability to respond to a greater need for digital engagement. Museums are increasingly providing API access to their collections. This is a niche but important entry into museum data. This project assesses the usability of these interfaces and the available documentation.
This project explores how museums can design for their audience’s changing needs, interests, and demographics. Specifically, this project focuses on how to design the APIs interface and documentation in order to support greater interactivity with their digital offerings.
Research team
- Elena Villaespesa, Assistant Professor
- Madhav Tankha, Visiting Assistant Professor
- Alejandra Estigarribia, Research Assistant, M.S. Information Experience Design
- Kate Nadel, Research Assistant, M.S. Museums and Digital Culture
- Elena Korshakova, Research Assistant, M.S. Information Experience Design
This research project has been done in collaboration with Jennie Choi (General Manager of Collections Information, The Met), Carolyn Royston (Chief Experience Officer, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum), Adam Quinn (Digital Product Manager, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum), Jane Alexander (Chief Information Officer, Cleveland Art Museum), Effie Kapsalis (Senior Digital Program Officer, Smithsonian Institution), Chad Weinard (Museum Experience Consultant and Strategist).
Research goals
- Understand how people use cultural heritage institutions’ APIs and APIs in general
- Evaluate the usability of the current interfaces and available documentation
- Learn users’ preferences to use APIs
- Assess the interest and satisfaction of the available data
- Identify use cases of the collection data
- Learn new ways of distributing and marketing the API information
Methodology
The APIs included in this study are:
The collection of data was done via unmoderated remote user testing using the tool SoundingBox. The study included 20 participants. This was a comparative analysis study so each participant conducted the tasks in one specific API (5 participants per API).
We identified four main user types during our study based on their familiarity with museums and programming skills.
Overall Findings
- Users valued positively the amount of data available and describe a range of usages from games, data visualization to virtual exhibitions. Adding ideas and examples of previous projects would be useful to show the possibilities.
- Users appreciate the understandability of the interface but some found the pages too long to scroll. A navigation bar or index is suggested.
- Examples are well appreciated, how to write queries, examples for different languages, how to combine the endpoints and format the queries. Users valued the options to quickly test their queries.
- Users got frustrated when trying to understand the endpoints, combinations of parameters and required fields. Users suggested having more examples, better error messages and consistency with standards.
- Language and terminology of the data was not always clear. Explanations are needed for those unfamiliar with museums.
Report
Museum APIs Best Practices
Related Publications
Evaluating the Usability of Museum APIs
Report