MW2010: Nate Solas, Hiding our Collections in Plain Site: Interface Strategies for "Findability"

by museums and the web on May 03, 2010

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A presentation from Museums and the Web 2010. ...

A presentation from Museums and the Web 2010.
A recent redesign of the collection search interface for an on-line art education tool (ArtsConnectEd.org) has provided an opportunity to compare usage patterns between the two versions. In this paper I first survey current search interface design patterns, then discuss the new interface, the log cleanup and analysis, and finally present evidence-based recommendations that may be applied to the general problem of presenting large collections on-line.

see http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/abstracts/prg_335002302.html

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MW2010: Nate Solas, Hiding our Collections in Plain Site: Interface Strategies for "Findability" — Presentation Transcript

Hiding our Collections in Plain Site Interface Strategies for Findability

Nate Solas

(@homebrewer)

Webmaster at the Walker Art Center Today: The problem The numbers Recommendations Beyond the interface

ArtsConnectEd 1 (ACE1)

What do the logs tell us about how this interface is used? id timestamp term # user agent 187710 2008-04-28 12:03:21.043 fire 53 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 187711 2008-04-28 12:03:22.123 tropical beaches Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 187712 2008-04-28 12:03:26.233 water 148 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727) 187713 2008-04-28 12:03:27.170 nature and animals 25 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

Top search terms in ACE 1 trying to browse? part of an assignment? Term Frequency photographs 734 paintings 413 sculpture 275 arts 263 ceramics 169 pattern 156 photograph 150 landscape 123 masks 121 children 112

"Term Facets"

Facet Other

Artist names are big, then medium, and finally culture

Recovering session information (simplified) EFF showed user agent usually contains enough unique information to identify a user out of 1,500 others. Combined with 3-minute session window = good enough. Timestamp Term User Agent Session 1:10:01pm horse Firefox 3 1 1:10:45pm pony Firefox 3 1 1:12:22pm flower IE 7 2 1:30:12pm gallop Firefox 3 3 1:31:42pm portrait Firefox 3.5 4 1:33:08pm portrait Firefox 3 3

Browsing the collection, circa 1990

Facet Other

Coverage of the collection +20% +100%

Time on site: easy to measure, hard to understand Is your interface inviting deeper exploration, or is it just taking them forever to figure it out?

Still typing facet terms into the search box?

Recommendations

Prevent dead ends 3x more dead ends! You Should Tell users (133) How many (826) Results (0) To expect (26) Bad Design Makes Them guess What's behind Each door

Explain the "no results" page

Suggest speling spelling

Beyond the interface

No search engine can crawl this site ... unless you provide a sitemap

SEO + Crawlable site + Sitemap =

Buzzword Bingo!

microdata

microformats

RDFa

Linked Open Data

The end. All Stormtrooper photos via CC license at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/ Pic. of baby with book: by me

museums and the web , the international conference for culture and heritage online at Museums and the Web The full papers accompanying this presentation is available online:

Solas, N., Hiding Our Collections in Plain Site: Interface Strategies for 'Findability'. In J. Trant and D. Bearman (eds). Museums and the Web 2010: Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum Informatics. Published March 31, 2010. Consulted May 3, 2010. http://www.archimuse.com/mw2010/papers/solas/solas.html 2 years ago

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MW2010: Nate Solas, Hiding our Collections in Plain Site: Interface Strategies for "Findability"

by museums and the web on May 03, 2010

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MW2010: Nate Solas, Hiding our Collections in Plain Site: Interface Strategies for "Findability" — Presentation Transcript