Why getting to know yourself helps getting to know your users.
Do we need to understand who we are as an institution before we attempt to get to know our visitors better? The importance of working with colleagues across departments to create a shared understanding of what we don’t know about our (digital) visitors.
NEO Collections is about finding new ways of working with museum collections — online and onsite, building on principles of openness and participation — this sounds brilliant, but where do we start?
The importance of hindsight: begin with what you have
As the NEO Collections project is equally about exploring new ways of working within the museums and fostering a digital mindset amongst colleagues, we started with an internal workshop discussing and exploring what we think accessible digital collections would be. We built an interdisciplinary group across the museum where participation was voluntary. Thus, as we begin to explore usability, we also spread this awareness across the organization.
Instinctively, we thought about some kind of online collection presentation, an imaginative, future and perfect version of collection.nationalmuseum.se. However, we realized quickly that even this was too broad a topic to understand how to proceed with specific ideas, tasks or even prototypes. Our discussion circled around making the presentation more simple, usable, and transparent, but it was difficult to steer the discussion to something tangible or manageable. We realized though that our discussion was very much about our needs and our ideas on what we would like the service to provide — but of course the service should be for our visitors.
By reflecting on this discrepancy, we ultimately arrived at the point that to provide better services to visitors online, we might need to take a closer look at what they think about existing services we provide already. The somewhat shocking aha-moment here was that we only have a very faint idea about what our digital visitors think or who they even are. As opposed to visitor research on site, online visitor research has not yet become a routine in our digital work. This is not only true for our online collection, which, with slight design adaptions, has been in place in it’s existing form since 2011. It also true for newer digital formats that we developed for the Nationalmuseum’s reopening in 2018, such as our Visitor Guide App, which provides audioguides and visitor orientation, but even digital access to every exhibited artwork. In 2018 we were happy about the relatively high visitor uptake of our new app, we got some positive feedback and loved it internally.
For some reason, we stopped here, at following up user usage-numbers, without realizing that we have no or just anecdotal input on what our users really thought about the experience. Which I believe is not only a problem for us at Nationalmuseum, but for a lot of colleagues at other museums, too.
Exploring accessibility and understanding empathy
Parallelly, we had spent some time on learning about accessible design, both onsite and digitally. A strong moment during those trainings was understanding that empathy makes all the difference. As soon as you can shift your own perspective to the user’s position, it is suddenly easy to see where the experience doesn’t work so well or what small changes might make the experience better.
With that groundwork to stand on, at some point everything fell into place. If we were able to put ourselves in our user’s shoes for some time, maybe we would realize what it was exactly we wanted to know? We understood that what we were looking for was what impact our offers were having on the users. When trying to figure out how to start measuring that, we eventually turned to the Europeana Impact Playbook. While the whole Change Pathway seemed a bit oversized for what we were trying to do, picking out some of the tools was extremely helpful for us.
Working through an Empathy Map, which is one of the tools presented in the Impact Playbook, helped us to change our perspective and to arrive at the questions we wanted to ask, that is to find out what users thought of and felt about the services we provide. Were they useful to them at all? Joyful? Well-spent time? Overwhelming? Confusing? Some of the questions, and ideas for prototypes we got during our workshop may seem banal in hindsight, but it was not before making a real effort to take the visitor’s point of view, that we arrived at these. The interviews with our users were being conducted in July, and I have never been more curious about receiving a report after my holidays.
Being comfortable with what we don’t know
Having worked through these kinds of tools, partly with expert guidance and partly without, has left me with two major insights:
1) I am still in shock that we did not do this earlier.
2) We were lucky to get some expert guidance through NEO Collections, but even as a novice to tools like the Empathy Map, I felt they were easy to use and understand. Some of you might — like me — feel it is intimidating to conduct a workshop for colleagues when you yourself don’t feel like you have full control over what it is you are doing. But the thing was that embracing the fact that none of us exactly knew where this was going probably the most valuable experience in terms of exploring new ways of working and fostering a digital (and error-friendly) mindset amongst colleagues.
Starting a discussion around user analysis and experience is not that hard as it might feel in our organisations, but we need to get it started, today. The good news is, you do not need a dedicated task force and a full-grown strategy, it might be enough to pick one digital offer, gather some of your colleagues around an Empathy Map and you will get some good thinking and action points to start from.
If you are equally curious about what our users had to say, please come back here in later in autumn.😊
NEO Collections is a 4 year project about finding new ways of working with museum collections — online and onsite. NEO is based on the principles of openness and participation. It aims to provide reliable and reusable information and great digital resources to the public and wants to explore how to make the collections more human-centered and accessible.
