The Met’s Object Page: Towards a New Synthesis of Scholarship and Storytelling
Full Paper
Villaespesa, E., Tankha, M., and Shehu, B. (2019).
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.
The HCI living curriculum as a community of practice
Commentary
St-Cyr, O., Jovanovic, A., Chignell, M., MacDonald, C. M., & Churchill, E. (2018).
HCI education reflects the continual evolution of HCI, embracing the changing landscapes of technology, infrastructure, and technology use. This forum aims to provide a platform for HCI educators, practitioners, researchers, and students to share their perspectives, reflections, and experiences related to HCI education.
Developing a Community of Practice to Support Global HCI Education
Workshop/Symposium
St-Cyr, O., MacDonald, C. M., Churchill, E. F., Preece, J. J., & Bowser, A. (2018).
ACM SIGCHI has been supporting research in HCI education for many years, most actively from 2011-2014. At CHI2014, a workshop on developing a new HCI living curriculum was held, building on three years of research and collaboration. We believe the time is right to develop and implement the suggested HCI living curriculum. We propose a hands-on workshop to develop a concrete active community of practice of HCI scholars and educators, sharing and collaborating to develop course outlines, curricula, and teaching materials. The workshop will define the conceptual framework and user experience of the HCI living curriculum, develop its information architecture and infrastructure, and evaluate how existing platforms do and do not fulfill the proposed needs. Post-workshop initiatives will aim to move towards implementing the first iteration of the living curriculum.
Assessing the implementation of authentic, client‐facing student projects in user experience (UX) education: Insights from multiple stakeholders
Full Paper
MacDonald, C. M. & Rozaklis, L. (2017).
User experience (UX) is often cited as one of the fastest growing occupations, creating opportunities across nearly every sector for individuals skilled in the application of user‐centered design principles and methods. Many information and library schools have responded to this demand by introducing more UX coursework into their curriculum, but the proliferation of agile software development and lean product design has incentivized organizations to look for experienced individuals for UX roles, even those that are considered entry‐level. As a result, aspiring information professionals face a paradoxical situation in which they are required to have UX experience before they can gain UX experience. This article provides an assessment of one institution’s efforts to overcome this experience gap by offering opportunities for students to participate in three types of authentic client‐facing UX projects. Through surveys of students and clients served over four academic years, we provide a set of lessons learned and recommended best practices for incorporating project‐based learning opportunities into UX courses.
Assessing the user experience (UX) of online museum collections: Perspectives from design and museum professionals
Full Paper
MacDonald, C. M. (2015).
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.