Mini-Workshops introduced tools, methods, or techniques. Crit Rooms featured a review of museum Web sites in "real time" and testing of attendees' Web sites took place in the Usability Lab. Issues were hashed out in Professional Forums. For more details about types of presentations see the Description of Session Formats.
Mini-Workshops and Professional Forums
Crit Rooms
Experienced Web designers and new media managers reviewed real museum Web sites and offered their comments in the "Crit Room". Modeled on the art school critique, Web sites were volunteered in advance by MW2008 attendees who were present to pose the problem and respond.
| Friday April 11, 2008 | |
| 11:30 am- 1:00 pm Evaluation |
Crit Room - 1Jennifer Trant, Canada |
| 2:30 pm- 4:00 pm Evaluation |
Crit Room - 2Jennifer Trant, Canada |
Usability Lab
On Friday, April 11, Michael Twidale and Paul Marty ran a live Usability Lab. Delegates:
- observed simple, low-cost, high-speed user testing of museum Web sites in action;
- volunteered to participate as a user tester and discovered some of the problems users have on unknown sites; and
- volunteered sites to be tested.
Each user test lasted about 20 minutes (with time for comments and questions) and people drifted in and out of the session. Sites to be tested were not evaluated in advance and volunteer users were selected at random.
The "user" left the room while the owner of the site describes what they consider a typical scenario – something the average user would be trying to do. This scenarios was converted into a task and given to the user to perform along with some randomly selected standard tasks. After each test, the user, site owner, test administrators and audience discussed what was learned.
Twidale and Marty demonstrated a variety of testing techniques throughout the day, but emphasized the thinking-aloud method so it was easy to follow along with the test subject. For more information about this technique, see Marty and Twidale's article Usability@90mph in First Monday.
| Friday April 11, 2008 | |
| 9:30 am- 11:30 am Evaluation | Usability LabPaul Marty, Michael Twidale, USA |
| 1:30 pm- 3:30 pm Evaluation | Usability Lab - 2Paul Marty, Michael Twidale, USA |
Demonstrations
New cultural heritage informatics applications were featured up close on Saturday, April 12, 2008.
