@ UKMW2006 in Leicester: 3. How do audiences discover museums online?

John Pratty chairs Mukti Bawa (PhD student at the University of Central England) and Mike Greenwood/Kati Streten

Mukti worked with the Birmingham Art Gallery to explore how users find museum web sites: directly, through a search engine, by a reference, through an academic site... two groups of users were compared, museum professionals and the general public. Preliminary results show personal interests are less specific, more likely to be satisfied by events listings, exhibitions, than by details about a specific object. 4 test sites: Birmingham, CMC, British Library online, User observation of different tasks:
1. personal interests / explore
2. unidentified image / find out about it
3. information card / find this work [how characteristics are extracted from print]
--> browse, search and find

Perceived Affordances (what do you think you can you do at a museum web site): tasks in test came from what the participants say that they might want to do at a museum site.

BUT, what value comes from evaluating user experience of badly designed sites?

Culture On-line case studies presented material covered previously in MW papers like Harcup 2006 and Streten 2006  and other places... it's now being talked about in the past tense. hmm.