I attended the JISC Web Usability Workshop yesterday. Dr Stuart Church talked about the need for user-centred design, the multiple ways one can do user research, design and its evaluation. The session provided useful pointers for the design process of our museum. We will need to establish user needs and keep asking users throughout the development so that we indeed produce something they will appreciate. We already have a reasonable idea of what our main users (students and lecturers) need, but nothing beats testing the design by naïve individuals.
During our partner visits we have been collating their expectations and needs and these will also be taken into account. Each of our stakeholders has different priorities and the challenge will be to come to a suitable compromise. The suggested route to this common ground is focusing on the end users’ experience. The UX vision (user experience) statement I mocked up during the session is: “The OVAM project is developing a real experience online veterinary anatomy museum with easily accessible quality resources allowing appropriate knowledge acquisition by learners.” Now this will need to be adjusted but it is a start.
One thing we need to keep in mind, we are not our users, even though we know them reasonably well. There are many ways of finding out what users want and need and we have already done some focus groups and questionnaires but utilising our soon to be recruited student curators in helping us ascertain the best possible design will be crucial to success. I really liked the idea of using personas (a user archetype used to help guide decisions about product features, navigation, interactions and even visual design) not only for the museum design but also possibly for helping users choose their route of navigation? Anyway, it is a food for thought.
The design and prototyping session re-iterated the fact that providing examples of possible designs for others to comment on is a must. We could use simple hand drawn sketches but I believe that something more interactive will be preferable. And the final product evaluation, well, it does seem quite far for now but we need to plan for the usability testing. I like the idea of expressing the user reactions as a tag cloud. At least we should not be struggling to find our potential users to test the resource; most of them are easily reached via our partners!
Really valuable post - sounds like we have got our work cut out for us - I think the interesting challenge will be to take a very old environment (the museum) and bring it into the 21st century web space .... fascinating
ReplyDeleteSounds like a very valuable workshop and thanks for a great report. Haing users/learners at the centre is such a focus in education generally.
ReplyDeleteI really agree with the idea of users having input where possible into routes of navigation as that is such a key feature. It's a bit analagous to the story of the arcitect who initially did not build any paths on a new university campus but waited to see where the ground was worn by people taking their preferred routes, and then having those routes paved.
Rebekah Brown