Online Museum Collections and UX

This study provides insights into the browsing experience of artists and creative professionals seeking inspiration from museums’ online collection using the Art Institute of Chicago as a case study. Data was collected during ten user testing sessions combining retrospective think aloud and eye-tracking methods. The evidence from this study highlights the importance of a visual-led experience and the effect of a masonry layout to browse through the artworks. The findings indicate that suggested tags and filters options create a successful entry point for users without a specific purpose for their visit. However, too many filtering options and unclear nomenclature impacts the usability and therefore having a hierarchy of the feature options and clear language is recommended. The results of this user research contributes to design guidelines for museum websites and may be of assistance to researchers and cultural heritage practitioners that want to use eye-tracking to evaluate online collections.

This article presents a segmentation of users who visit The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s online collection. The six segments defined in this study are professional researcher, personal interest information-seeker, student researcher, inspiration-seeker, casual browser, and visit planner. The study combines web analytics with more traditional survey methods to show how digital research tools can be incorporated into visitor studies in the emerging domain of online product evaluation. The results of this user research advance the understanding of museum website audiences, with detailed data and descriptions of each segment. The article argues that it is important for museums to create multiple kinds of online experiences to reflect the varying motivations, art background, context, and online behavior of website users. Moreover, the article provides a discussion on the implications of this user diversity for evaluating the impact and value of online museum collections. The evaluation framework needs to include metrics to measure the user experience by considering the online collection from three perspectives: as a resource for research and learning, as a source of inspiration, and as a tool for planning a visit to the museum.

The Met’s “object page” is the first touchpoint for over 70% of the visitors to its online collection. The user journey to this experience and throughout it has many permutations and goals. Users come from a variety of sources: search engines, social media, other websites, and are greatly diverse in their motivations and familiarity with art. The 450,000+ Object pages are a testament to the encyclopedic nature of The Met itself—offering a great breadth and depth of meticulously cultivated information and highlighting the connectivity of cultures and multiple interpretations of the objects it exhibits. The objects themselves span a dizzying array of media: painting, sculpture, manuscripts, jewelry, coins, tapestry, baseball cards, furniture, musical instruments, and more. A significant challenge clearly arises: how to display all of this ever-expanding information to tell the story of the artwork in a manner that is authentic, comprehensive, accessible, and inspiring to all users—whether academic or casual browsers—across devices. As museums try to define their existence in the digital space, how does the object page contribute in projecting The Met’s voice and expand its outreach beyond the museum’s walls. To achieve this end, the digital team at The Met conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative tests on the pages to gauge users’ online behavior, interests, expectations, and frustrations, across user segments and devices. The methods and tools used included web analytics, heatmaps, user testing (both remote and face-to-face), surveys, user interviews, and A/B testing. This paper will present the findings about the user expectations, preferences, and behaviors on the object page as well as a discussion of the benefits and challenges of the methods used to collect and analyze the data.

Studies show that online museum collections are among the least popular features of a museum website, which many museums attribute to a lack of interest. While it’s certainly possible that a large segment of the population is simply uninterested in viewing museum objects through a computer screen, it is also possible that a large number of people want to find and view museum objects digitally but have been discouraged from doing so due to the poor user experience (UX) of existing online-collection interfaces. This paper describes the creation and validation of a UX assessment rubric for online museum collections. Consisting of ten factors, the rubric was developed iteratively through in-depth examinations of several existing museum-collection interfaces. To validate the rubric and test its reliability and utility, an experiment was conducted in which two UX professionals and two museum professionals were asked to apply the rubric to three online museum collections and then provide their feedback on the rubric and its use as an assessment tool. This paper presents the results of this validation study, as well as museum-specific results derived from applying the rubric. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the rubric may be used to improve the UX of museum-collection interfaces and future research directions aimed at strengthening and refining the rubric for use by museum professionals.