Stephen,
 >>
Hi, does anyone have experience of using user-centred design to create
either exhibitions/displays and/or web sites please? I would be really
interested to find out how useful you found this approach.
 >>
Dear colleagues, have you built learning activities into your Museum web
site?  Was it important for you to be able to demonstrate the
effectiveness of your designs?  Did you test the designs during
development, and/or after they were completed?
 >>

This is pretty much established best practice and becoming more widespread as
funders are demanding summative evaluation on exhibitions and 
projects after completion.
They're also demanding that institutions specify objectives and 
audiences upfront with their
funding applications - although I would agree that these can easily 
get lost along the way.
It tends to be much easier to do formative evaluation on exhibits and 
micro-sites than
whole institution sites due to the difficulty of specifying audiences 
and objectives for a whole institution site.
The amount of evaluation done tends to depend on the attitudes and 
resources of the institution but if you're looking into this
your main issues are going to be
Institutions don't tend to release the results of evaluation unless 
they're completely positive. This is for a variety of political
reasons connected with the press and funders.
There's also very little movement by institutions to publish anything 
about their development methods and
experiences - in general its just not seen as a priority. There are 
honourable exceptions like the Tate's Multimedia tour page
http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/multimediatour/re_keyfindings.htm. 
There's also bits and pieces by Ben Gammon scattered around the web
like this one 
http://ukupa.org.uk/events/presentations/science_museum.pdf (google 
"Ben Gammon" for more).

Given that there's a lot of work going on, your problem is unlikely 
to be finding examples - its much more likely to be
getting people to tell you about them in any detail - particularly if 
user testing wasn't done or produced "bad" results.
My recommendation would be either to get hold of a list of recent 
projects from a major funder like HLF or Wellcome and then
go and interview a selection of the project managers or pick one 
project which did use a lot of user testing and study it in detail.
To give you an idea, one project I worked on last year did around 20 
formative evaluation studies in 4 months of development so there's a
lot to get your teeth into.

All the best with your project

Joe




Joe Cutting
Computer exhibits and installations
www.joecutting.com
The Fishergate Centre, 4 Fishergate, York, YO10 4FB
01904 624681

As of 30th October 2006 I have a new office so
please note my new address and phone number  

**************************************************
For mcg information and to manage your subscription to the list, visit the website at http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk
**************************************************