Usability Analysis and Museums on the Web
Since 2000, I have been applying the theories and principles of usability analysis to the study of museum websites. As the number of virtual museum visitors increases (many museums now have five to ten times as many online visitors as physical visitors), it becomes extremely important that museums have attractive, well-designed, and usable online interfaces, and many authors have commented on the need to improve the overall usability of museum websites.
Over the past few years, I have been conducting a series of usability evaluations of museum websites at various national and international conferences in order to introduce more museum professionals to the concepts of usability analysis and to analyze the usability of museum websites in general. Drawing upon results of these evaluations, I developed a conceptual framework for analyzing the usability of museum websites comprising fifteen dimensions grouped into five categories:
Marty, P.F. & Twidale, M.B. (2004). Lost in Gallery Space: A Conceptual Framework for Analyzing the Usability Flaws of Museum Web Sites. First Monday 9 (9), available online at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue9_9/marty/index.html
In addition, while conducting these evaluations of museum websites, I explored related questions to see how the theories and techniques of human computer interaction can be applied to the analysis of online interfaces in a rapid and inexpensive manner. Working with Michael Twidale (University of Illinois), I developed a demonstration method for usability analysis specifically designed to maximize the number of usability findings in the shortest amount of time. In these papers, we have explored the value of new methods for usability assessment and raising questions about current approaches for assessing the validity of usability metrics:
Marty, P.F. & Twidale, M.B. (In progress). Exploring a design space for extreme usability and minimalist user testing methods.
Marty, P.F. & Twidale, M.B. (2005). Usability@90mph: Presenting and evaluating a new, high-speed method for demonstrating user testing in front of an audience. First Monday 10 (7), available online at http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_7/marty/index.html
Twidale, M.B. & Marty, P.F. (2005). Come On Down! A Game Show Approach to Illustrating Usability Evaluation Methods. Interactions 12 (6), 24-27.
Marty, P.F. & Twidale, M.B. (2005). Extreme discount usability engineering. Technical Report ISRN UIUCLIS--2005/1+CSCW. Available online at http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~twidale/pubs/ExtremeDiscUETechReport.pdf
Recently, my interests in museums and the web have led naturally to a study of 3D collaborative virtual environments in museums. Since 2006, I have been studying how museum professionals can use online 3D environments such as Second Life to meet the needs of their online visitors:
Urban, R.J., Marty, P.F., & Twidale, M.B. (2007). A Second Life for your Museum: The use of 3D collaborative virtual environments by museums. In D. Bearman & J. Trant (Eds.), Proceedings of Museums and the Web 2007. Toronto, CA.: Archives & Museum Informatics. Available online at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/urban/urban.html
Urban, R.J., Twidale, M.B., & Marty, P.F. (2007). Second life for museums and archeological modeling. In Proceedings of Digital Humanities 2007 (pp. 218-219). Champaign-Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Available online at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dh2007/abstracts/xhtml.xq?id=254