Feedback from Nancy Proctor (August 14, 2009)

Notes from a feedback session with Nancy on August 14, 2009.

Design guidelines, not restrictions

- Offer museums design guidelines on forming content, b ut don't put in too many restrictions.
- Many museums will likely want to put in a lot of text, even if visitors won't read it.
- Give museums that capacity, even if only as a placebo.

Collections browsing page

- Instead of having a title and description for each collection (e.g., "Paintings, prints, and drawings - Paintings, miniatures, silhouettes, prints and cartoons that reflect Canada from the 18th to the 21st centuries."), just the title, and possibly a subtitle would make things simpler.

Dealing with longer lists

- For long lists of artifacts, grids of thumbnails, etc., use a page extender, like "Show 25 more"

Structured vs. unstructured

- Within exhibition and other pages, the content might not be inherently well-structured (e.g., of structure--the way we put everything in a hierarchical order of facets for the collections page)
- Might want to provide a drag-and-drop, re-ordered interface to allow museums to manually set their own structure and ordering.
- Artifact-centric, highly structured view isn't necessarily good (though not necessarily bad either)
- Allow room for messiness, unstructuredness, serendipity--people are messy

"My collection"

- If having one application per museum means one needs to manage multiple personal collections, this is is bad.
- Want aggregated collection--collect things from different museums all into one place.
- e.g., artstream.org (allows collecting across certain collections/institutions; currently pretty small; apparently the SAAM uses them)

In-museum vs. out of museum

- Sees mobile apps like this being used more in-museum at first than out of museum (partly because of museum publicity/support?)
- Museums may want to see this as a substitute for audio tours (wouldn't want to be carrying both an audio tour device and another mobile device around)
- Museums may see this as a platform to support out-of-museum educational objectives--access to knowledge for those who can't visit the museum

Tours

- Would like to see tours baked in somehow
- What highlights to see in the museum?
- Propose a particular route through the museum, what things one should see
- In general, the device should provide: browsing, searching, touring

Main screen

- Different sorts of things: events, new acquisitions, particular part of the collection, exhibition, museum services

Use case for tagging

- Don't worry too much about finding the ideal use case for tagging. Don't take everything on our shoulders--museums can provide the motivation (e.g., games, scavenger hunts) (e.g., Wikipedia sent their users on a scavenger hunt to museums to populate entries with snaps of artwork, etc.)