Community Engagement through User Experience

User Experience (UX) is how your visitors feel about a product or service, whether you’re designing a website, an exhibit, or a toaster. How do you know if your target audience is having a good or bad experience? Learn to put yourself in your users’ shoes in order to better understand their motivations, so that you can create a welcoming experience and make something that is useful, easy to use, and enjoyable for them.

We’ll cover the fundamentals of user experience, why it matters, and we’ll detail a typical UX journey and common methodologies that are useful for museum professionals, emphasizing ways to engage new and existing communities along the way. We’ll practice research techniques, including interviews and contextual inquiries (observing the way your visitors already interact with your exhibits), that allow you to learn about your visitors’ objectives, rather than designing from assumptions. We’ll develop personas to clarify which new audiences you want to connect with, and what works best for them, asking questions like, Why aren’t they users already? What barriers does your museum present? What needs could you be meeting?

We’ll also review common techniques for evaluating digital content using activities like card sorting and content audits, and we’ll conduct usability testing to evaluate your projects and gather valuable feedback.

As a result of this session, participants will be able to:
Implement user experience strategies to better understand new and existing audiences
Convince others in your organization to adopt this process
Conduct in-person interviews and contextual inquiry with visitors to learn about their goals and objectives
Use activities like card sorting to understand your digital content
Conduct low-cost evaluations with visitors

This session is for exhibit designers and developers, curators, content developers, museum technologists, and marketers.

Bibliography:
Community and Civic Engagement in Museum Programs
Guest Post by Stacey Marie Garcia Museum 2.0 Blog
http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2012/09/guest-post-community-and-civic.html

Co-Creating with Visitors
The Participatory Museum
http://www.participatorymuseum.org/chapter8/