Chosen Website
We have chosen the Norman Rockwell Museum to analyze for the rest of the course (https://www.nrm.org/). We chose this site because of the many issues we noticed, hoping to figure out possible suggestions as to how to fix it. After looking at the website as a group, we decided to focus on the sections that include its collection/research resources, open careers, and exhibits. All of these sections have issues and usability violations of varying degrees, and we believe that it would be helpful to look at sections with clear usability issues to deepen our understanding about the class material as well as help us understand how to apply what we’ve learned to real life.
User Profile/Persona
The type of people who would potentially use this website are those who are interested in the museum’s collections, interested in going to visit the museum, interested in going to the museum’s events, and/or interested in donating/giving back to the museum. In order to analyze this website through the lens of someone who fits these criteria, we have developed a persona. After deliberation, we created a persona that is an art history student potentially interested in getting an internship at this museum.
Scenario
We developed a scenario to help guide us in figuring out how our persona might interact with this website. Based on both the general persona we created and the overall type of people who visit this website, the scenario we created for our persona is:
Cameron is an undergraduate art history student at a local university. They became interested in Normal Rockwell’s works after attending a class that included these works. Cameron looked online to try and find more of these works, and ended up stumbling upon the Norman Rockwell Museum’s website. After looking around, they are interested in visiting the museum and, as they need an internship before they graduate from their program, would love to also intern at this museum as well. However, they are having some trouble navigating this museum’s website.
Through the use of this scenario, we are then able to develop tasks that a person like our persona, Cameron, would complete on this website. We expect Cameron to initially make use of the common search function on the main page of the site to find out more information on a certain collection. We also expect Cameron to navigate the third-party purchasing widget in hopes of purchasing their ticket. In performing these tasks, Cameron will have to explore alternative methods of accomplishing their tasks.
Developed Tasks
For the future user tests that we will be completing individually, we have developed three tasks for our test users. The first task is to plan a visit to the museum by finding out how to buy a ticket and how to get to the museum. This is the most likely task a person going to this website might complete as many people who visit a website for a museum are looking to visit the museum itself as well. The second task is to find out if any internship opportunities are open and the details about the internship as well as someone like Cameron would look for career opportunities in this way. The third task is for the user to find a specific work called “Pointing Hand” in the Norman Rockwell Museum’s digital collections. A student like Cameron might hope to learn more about the museum, how an internship at the NRM can benefit their career, and if “Pointing Hand” would be a good candidate to do an assignment on. Therefore, using these types of tasks in our user tests might show us how someone might actually use the website.