Tekniska Museet - Usability on Webpage
I'm going to try to do a state-of-the-art analysis of the Tekniska Museum webpage. First, I'm briefly going to analyze who the target group is for the webpage, and who actually uses it. Second, I'm going to analyze what worked well, and what didn't work well based on my own experience and based on a test with assigned tasks I asked a testperson to do. Last, I will present the tasks and results that I assigned to the testperson together with screenshots of the website.
Who is the target group for the webpage?
From what I understand from using the webpage myself, it’s relatively easy to find basic information of the museum, such as opening hours, prices, exhibitions and so on. It’s harder to find what else this page contains, such as questions you can ask to the staff, and information about, for example, inventors.
Therefore I believe that the target group the developers had in mind for this page probably is a medium technical skilled person, a person that is used to more interactive webpages and links. It’s probably persons between ages 15-50 that can find information from the website with ease the first time they visit them since I assume that these people use highly interactive technology daily.
Who is using the webpage?
Those who actually use the webpage are probably, for the most part, parents with small children and maybe teachers who's looking for information about visits from schools. I would imagine that the former has more experience in using these kind of website, and that the latter are having a harder time with the webpage. (Presumably because I think that they for the most part are older and non technical...). I also think that the people in the target group fits into the users of the webpage, though the youngsters might use the app instead or as a compliment.
What is working well on the site?
There is easy access to most of the site in just a few clicks! The top menu is the shortcut to almost everything that possibly would want to find. This was proved in the test I did with a test person.
The front page is presenting all the relevant information that you need, though there is a lot of links and pictures which could drag attention and confuse the user from concentrating on his/hers assigned tasks.
What is working bad?
Things that is not working well on the page is the search function which isn’t presenting the results in a clear way. The user has to scroll down on the resulting page to find more results than the two that are shown directly after the search. This wasn’t obvious the first time I and my testperson used the search function.
Another thing, which I discovered from the test tasks, is the questions that you can ask to a specific exhibition. The design here is clearly not thought through and it was hard to see where the questions were, and where the user could ask a question himself.
The font and the titles on some pages made it hard to see what and when information was presented, as in the example with the exhibition questions.
Also, as the test showed, the top menu wasn't designed for a small computer screen like mine. There was no indication that you could scroll down on the extended menu to get more accessible links. You can see picture examples of this in the task test below.
Tasks for the test person:
1. Find the opening hours.
This task was easy. The test person found the opening hours in just two clicks. There was a direct link from the top of the webpage, but hidden in the top menu. It can be accessed as shown in the picture. (The opening hours is displayed at the bottom of the page at all times, so you can always scroll down to find them.)
2. Find future exhibitions.
This task was also relatively easy for the test person to achieve. She found a link for this information from the same top menu as the opening hours could be accessed . See picture above (link is down to the left).
3. Find the GAME ON exhibition and write them a question.
As previously, the test person put the mouse over the “Besöka” button on the top menu to get the extended options for that choice. When you click on “Utställningar” you get to this view:
She then clicked on the GAME ON picture to get to the GAME ON exhibition, and the view changed to this:
After some trouble, she managed to find the questionnaire at the bottom of this page. But it was hard to see when the questions started and that the text you saw actually was user generated questions. In the picture below the user generated questions can be seen at the bottom.
It was a long scroll down until the questionnaire showed up, and this was hard to understand for user due to the design of this page.
4 Find information about swedish inventors.
This task showed to be the most difficult one. This was probably due to a design problem on the extended view from the top menu.
This is how the menu looks like when you move the mouse over the “Veta mer” button at the top:
As you can see, the menu doesn’t show swedish inventors. But if you scroll down while keeping the mouse on the extended menu, you’ll notice that there are more clickable options on this menu. One of those is directing you to the swedish inventors page. It took some time until the test person found out that this was possible. Instead of scrolling down on this menu she tried to search for “svenska uppfinnare”. The search result presented the link “svenska uppfinnare” as the third result, which was not presented until you scrolled down on the webpage.
(this is the search result for “svenska uppfinnare”. The link to the page “svenska uppfinnare” is just below the second result visible on the screen. The test person did scroll down, but didn’t see the link. She continued to search for the inventor page using different links and methods for a while until she noticed that it was accessible in the “Veta mer” menu as described above.)
5. Can you buy food at the museum?
This task was also easy for the subject to find. It was accessible from the top menu and she arrived to the right page in just 2 clicks.
6. Can you buy SL-tickets at the museum?
The last and final task went smoothly aswell. She first went to the Ticket page, but here there was only information about the museum tickets. She then went to the “Hitta hit” page where there was information about the museum selling SL-tickets. This information is also presented in the “Butik” page but the user never thought of going there.
/ Emil
Who is using the webpage?
Those who actually use the webpage are probably, for the most part, parents with small children and maybe teachers who's looking for information about visits from schools. I would imagine that the former has more experience in using these kind of website, and that the latter are having a harder time with the webpage. (Presumably because I think that they for the most part are older and non technical...). I also think that the people in the target group fits into the users of the webpage, though the youngsters might use the app instead or as a compliment.
What is working well on the site?
There is easy access to most of the site in just a few clicks! The top menu is the shortcut to almost everything that possibly would want to find. This was proved in the test I did with a test person.
The front page is presenting all the relevant information that you need, though there is a lot of links and pictures which could drag attention and confuse the user from concentrating on his/hers assigned tasks.
What is working bad?
Things that is not working well on the page is the search function which isn’t presenting the results in a clear way. The user has to scroll down on the resulting page to find more results than the two that are shown directly after the search. This wasn’t obvious the first time I and my testperson used the search function.
Another thing, which I discovered from the test tasks, is the questions that you can ask to a specific exhibition. The design here is clearly not thought through and it was hard to see where the questions were, and where the user could ask a question himself.
The font and the titles on some pages made it hard to see what and when information was presented, as in the example with the exhibition questions.
Also, as the test showed, the top menu wasn't designed for a small computer screen like mine. There was no indication that you could scroll down on the extended menu to get more accessible links. You can see picture examples of this in the task test below.
Tasks for the test person:
1. Find the opening hours.
This task was easy. The test person found the opening hours in just two clicks. There was a direct link from the top of the webpage, but hidden in the top menu. It can be accessed as shown in the picture. (The opening hours is displayed at the bottom of the page at all times, so you can always scroll down to find them.)
2. Find future exhibitions.
This task was also relatively easy for the test person to achieve. She found a link for this information from the same top menu as the opening hours could be accessed . See picture above (link is down to the left).
3. Find the GAME ON exhibition and write them a question.
As previously, the test person put the mouse over the “Besöka” button on the top menu to get the extended options for that choice. When you click on “Utställningar” you get to this view:
She then clicked on the GAME ON picture to get to the GAME ON exhibition, and the view changed to this:
After some trouble, she managed to find the questionnaire at the bottom of this page. But it was hard to see when the questions started and that the text you saw actually was user generated questions. In the picture below the user generated questions can be seen at the bottom.
It was a long scroll down until the questionnaire showed up, and this was hard to understand for user due to the design of this page.
4 Find information about swedish inventors.
This task showed to be the most difficult one. This was probably due to a design problem on the extended view from the top menu.
This is how the menu looks like when you move the mouse over the “Veta mer” button at the top:
As you can see, the menu doesn’t show swedish inventors. But if you scroll down while keeping the mouse on the extended menu, you’ll notice that there are more clickable options on this menu. One of those is directing you to the swedish inventors page. It took some time until the test person found out that this was possible. Instead of scrolling down on this menu she tried to search for “svenska uppfinnare”. The search result presented the link “svenska uppfinnare” as the third result, which was not presented until you scrolled down on the webpage.
(this is the search result for “svenska uppfinnare”. The link to the page “svenska uppfinnare” is just below the second result visible on the screen. The test person did scroll down, but didn’t see the link. She continued to search for the inventor page using different links and methods for a while until she noticed that it was accessible in the “Veta mer” menu as described above.)
5. Can you buy food at the museum?
This task was also easy for the subject to find. It was accessible from the top menu and she arrived to the right page in just 2 clicks.
6. Can you buy SL-tickets at the museum?
The last and final task went smoothly aswell. She first went to the Ticket page, but here there was only information about the museum tickets. She then went to the “Hitta hit” page where there was information about the museum selling SL-tickets. This information is also presented in the “Butik” page but the user never thought of going there.
/ Emil
No comments:
Post a Comment