Digital futures museum websites at ma 2014
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A 20 min session delivered at the 2014 Museums Association conference in Cardiff. The session took place in the afternoon on Thursday 9 October. It has the title of “What Makes the Perfect Museum Website?” and the aim was to give delegates a chance to think about how their own websites work and what could be changed and improved. I spoke about the importance of using museum websites from a marketing point of view, with a primary focus of driving visitors through the door of the museum, while the other speaker would look at sites from a curatorial or educational side - i.e talking more about online content and community. We looked at the ways these approaches differ, how they can work together, and the various challenges each raises.
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Digital futures museum websites at ma 2014
- 1. DIGITAL FUTURES: MUSEUM WEBSITES @zakmensah / Head of Digital Museums Association Conference
- 2. Zak Mensah +44 (0)777 522 7272 zak.mensah@bristol.gov.uk zakmensah.co.uk bristolmuseums.org.uk @zakmensah
- 3. What Makes the Perfect Museum Website? (see notes section)
- 4. User needs
- 8. Digital Principles 1. Users at the heart 2. Evaluation 3. Digital services 4. Build digital skills 5. Experiment 6. Collaboration (Partnerships) 7. Sustainability 8. Open practices
- 10. Designing for four screens
- 17. Listening
- 21. Content Strategy
- 22. ...online, you don’t have a captive audience. You have a multi-tasking, distracted, read-to-leave- your-site-at-any-time audience who has very specific goals in mind. If your content doesn’t meet those goals, and quickly, they will leave.
- 23. Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content. http://alistapart.com/article/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy
- 25. Basic Principles ● Good content is appropriate ● Good content is useful ● Good content is user-centred ● Good content is clear ● Good content is consistent ● Good content is concise ● Good content is supported The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
- 28. Measurement
- 33. Do these 1. User needs 2. Listening 3. Improving our web literacies together
Editor's Notes
- I am putting together a digital session at this year’s Museums Association conference in Cardiff. The session takes place in the afternoon on Thursday 9 October. It has the title of “What Makes the Perfect Museum Website?” and the aim is to give delegates a chance to think about how their own websites work and what could be changed and improved. We were hoping that one person would speak about the importance of using museum websites from a marketing point of view, with a primary focus of driving visitors through the door of the museum, while the other speaker would look at sites from a curatorial or educational side - i.e talking more about online content and community. We'd be interested in hearing about the ways these approaches differ, how they can work together, and the various challenges each raises.
- Don’t be shy about getting in touch if you have any questions about making websites or anything digital in the culture and heritage sectors.
- What makes each website project different are the constraints. Constraints are actually a very good thing as it makes some decisions for us and helps define the maximum scope we can attack. What is the best job we can do based on our constraints? for Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives our constraints were: Budget (sub £20,000) Time - must deliver before year end 2013-14 Technical ability - in-house we have staff who have lots of experience building websites Infrastructure - we must adhere to Bristol City Council processes and guidance on web strategy
- EVERYTHING you do should be focused on your users needs. How can I connect what they want with our collections, expertise and spaces….oh and our free toilets There are lots of benefits to being user needs focused. Read the GDS Service Manual - read the entire thing and then read it again and again) https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/phases/discovery.html but start with the discovery phase. The benefits of following user needs in addition to all the stuff in the GDS manual include: You gain buy in from management as you're following the same path as central government who have built the critically aclaimed gov.uk platform and your IT department are all in love with GDS so you can’t lose Reduces internal beef about who is right Gives you a clear process (design by committee shudder - i’ll let you have input if I can come to your department and make my own sweeping changes ...I thought not) Allows ALL staff to make contributions about their experiences with audiences
- You are probably not your user so unless you and your user have the same motivations then just use user needs to solve problems. Actually, you might be your user - https://www.uie.com/articles/self_design/ https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tribehut/5403868/
- R.I.P our old website presence that passed 19th May 2014 Note that local authority websites are generally aimed at many tasks that aren’t your own. Because of the tidal change in central IT due largely to GDS many sites are moving to dealing with “transactions” making the gulf ever larger for us. Plus all this content is “added by committee”.
- We launched phase one of our website on 19th May 2014 http://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/ We moved through the GDS phases of discovery, Alpha, Beta to Live. Then we retired our mshed.org and removed all local authority website pages minus one top landing page. We had a clear brief, clear leadership and enough willpower
- http://www.labs.bristolmuseums.org.uk/digital-principles/ We kept our principles at the heart of the project
- A website is a platform for many things beyond marketing. Design a system not a website. Example of our pattern library which we can now use to test and build out new ideas http://bmag-guide.fffunction5.mixture.io/visuals/cut-ins
- We are now designing for four screens: TV (yes TV!), desktops/laptops, tablets and mobile. TV http://thenounproject.com/term/television/2650/ Desktop http://thenounproject.com/term/computer/3633/ Tablet http://thenounproject.com/term/tablet/2158/ Mobile http://thenounproject.com/term/nfc-phone/3229/
- How many find your information is evolving. In this slide you can see what happens when you use voice searching via your mobile. “Google what can i do in Bristol tomorrow?” note we aren’t there (weep)
- Q2 July to end of September 2014 google analytics showing that mobile and tablet visits account for nearly 50% of our traffic. We expect this number to increase year on year.
- Follow the entire GDS process starting with the discovery phase. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual Do NOT skip out the Discovery or alpha phase. I will find you!
- As part of the Discovery Phase we reviewed our data, quizzed the public AND our staff (front of house are a goldmine). In the photo above Dan from agency fffunction is talking to one of our staff about what the public ask about in Gallery - mostly not about collection but things like “i wanted to see the nearly car park, wasn’t sure if you had a lift etc Photo credit:https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tribehut/12210541086/
- Collect and group ideas, barriers or motivators in a card sort or post it session! https://secure.flickr.com/photos/tribehut/12291193524/
- Tasks like content audits are quick and free to do. Download a sample of your Google analytics data (min 3 months but gather as much as you can within last 18 months) add the pageviews, length of time on page and value to both you and your audience (pssst nobody wants most of the things we assume they want) Read Content Strategy for the web by Kristina Halvorson http://contentstrategy.com/ If you have no budget for the book read http://alistapart.com/article/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy
- Spend lots of time listening to the public, staff and the data. Get familiar with your tripadvisor reviews etc
- Search the web for the place that link to you (check out Google webmaster tools for sources) and see what they say about you.
- Read the five star reviews and the one star
- What happens when you search for your own museum and/or department?
- http://alistapart.com/article/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy Buy a copy of http://www.abookapart.com/products/the-elements-of-content-strategy and insist that staff working closely on the project read it… takes 2-3 hours
- http://alistapart.com/article/thedisciplineofcontentstrategy
- The elements of content strategy http://blog.braintraffic.com/2012/07/from-the-archive-brain-traffic-lands-the-quad/
- ASk your social media followers what they use the website for
- You can collect hashtags using this handy Google spreadsheet. Great for listening to conversations about you http://tags.hawksey.info/
- Managers like measurement - build this into your plan
- responding to survey feedback, using analytics to track how people are using the website, making small iterations We added a list of all the related lectures based on real feedback and barriers months after launch http://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/wildlife-photographer-loose/
- Google analytics is free to install and use. It collects data about your website visitors. Get this data. IF it hasn’t been installed, get it installed and collect data for 4-8 weeks even.
- There are many tools for listening to your audience, try the free trials to see what best suits you https://www.thinkup.com/
- We plan to run a three year programme of improving staff web skills thorugh a digital literacy programme and use http://openbadges.org/ for recognition of these skills to help the sector.