Research on 'Quality' in Online Experiences for Museum Users
Introduction
What Impacts 'Quality' in Online Museum Projects?
In CHIN’s research project on ‘Quality’ in Online Experiences for Museum Users, some factors that have impacted on the quality of user experience are:
- A development process that is sensitive to the needs of its users and works from the users'
perspective. Targeting a youth-focused market can be very effective for VMC products.
- Using a more constructivist user-oriented approach helps partners to think about exhibiting
collections in the virtual medium rather than using traditional exhibitry.
- Working with multimedia developers provides opportunities for museums to push the boundaries of
traditional curatorial practice, providing opportunities to practice, or learn about, writing for users in an online medium.
- Unique content and global appeal seems to bring the most traffic to VMC products, particularly through easy access on the first page of a search engine.
- Having different language versions enable more diverse users to have access to VMC products globally.
- Clear navigation and site structure plays a key role in quality. Presenting information intuitively will help users find what they are looking for.
- Rich images and content using databases help to organize the enormous amount of images and content from multiple museums and heritage organizations involved in international partnerships. Database-driven Web sites enable users to dynamically access rich content and images based on their own choice.
- Good partnerships and working relationships with national, international museums, heritage organization partners, and savvy multimedia companies enable all parties involved the opportunity to exchange ideas, and learn from one another.
- Marketing of regions across Canada helps to promote tourism to these areas in part because of press at launches, Marketing, and Featuring.
- Evaluating expectations and objectives of development teams measures the success of a VMC product.