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
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