Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

In a continuing quest to better understand and respond to what we hope is an ever growing and changing audience for IMA content online, you may have notice that we’ve recently launched a new visitor survey on the main imamuseum.org web page. It may be a little bit hidden currently, as we’re still highlighting our current exhibition of Ming Dynasty works of art (see Power and Glory) but we’re asking visitors to our web pages to tell us a little bit about themselves and how they use our sites so that we can better meet their needs and desires moving forward. Which leads me to a very important contingent of web visitors…

YOU our IMA Blog Readers!
(Click here to help us by taking a short survey)

We did a similar survey about 1 year ago and are really interested to see how our audience and our performance has changed since that time. Our gut feeling is that these have changed some, but surveys like this will really help us know for sure.

I thought I’d ante up two items to sweeten the deal a little bit to entice you to help us out. From the graphic above you see that one of these is a drawing for an iPod touch give away to one lucky survey taker. The other is that I’ll promise to write up the results of the survey and present them here for others to pick and poke at.

On the web team, we hope to use these survey results in the creation of User Personasto reflect the current state of our online audience. Personas like these are an element of User Centered Design(UCD) and can really help us conceptualize features and workflows for the web. While we don’t actually adhere to all the tenets of UCD, this is one feature that has been helpful in the past.

We originally partnered with a local marketing and communications firm, Williams Randall, in the creation of User Personas for the re-launch of imamuseum.org in September 2007. Through a pretty detailed set of user research, they helped us develop 4 primary personas which we’ve come back to from time to time.

We gave them each fictional names and roles, which really helped us to think about them as people:

• Kate – a young, single, social, art enthusiast
• Andrew – a high school art teacher
• Claire – a parent of young children
• Annette – a current member of the IMA

In my opinion, we’re far from perfect when it comes to meeting all the needs of even these four imaginary people, but our hope is that by having actual targets in front of us that really matter we might end up focussing on features and content that makes a different.

So, will you help us get to know you better? We’d really like to better understand who you are and how you use our site. Maybe next year’s personas will be a Tim, or Jill who we havn’t met yet!

• Tags: survey, user-centered design, user-experience, user-personas, web development
 

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 6:00 am and is filed under Marketing, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.