Indianapolis Museum of Art Blog

No, sorry… we’re not building a time machine. But, last week at the monthly All-Staff meeting, IMA employees were treated to a sneak peek of a monitoring project that the MIS department has in the works. It’s similar to what I wrote about in an earlier post, but on a bigger scale (by the way, that Eco-button went glitchy on me). In the IMA machine room, we have rack-mounted servers that host a variety of applications used by staff at the museum. There’s also a decent 16 terabytes (1TB = 1024GB) of disk storage in there.

One of the racks in our machine room

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For those of you who are regular blog readers, you’ll probably remember a post from earlier this year where we talked a little bit about user personas and how we use them at the IMA to try and improve the ways we produce web content.  In that post, we asked for help in taking a survey that would refresh the information we have about our online audience.  I promised that we’d share results with you on how things went and what we’re learning.  Never one to shirk on a promise, here are some of the results on that survey…  some pretty interesting bits in here!

You can find a lot more graphs from the survey results in the rest of this post, but I thought it would be interested to just pull out a few interesting stats for you up front.

Stats Quick-Hit:

• 480 People took the survey between 12/22/2009 and 2/9/2009 (our web traffic during that time included 113,000 unique visitors and 450,000 pages served)
• Almost 90% of people who took the survey were satisfied or very satisfied with their experience on imamuseum.org
• The average visitor is Female (67%) and between 25-34 year old.
• More than 55% of website visitors use Facebook! Guess keeping the IMA’s facebook page flush with content is a good idea!
• Sadly 51% of survey-takers Never Comment on Blogs (c’mon… poke us a little, we don’t bite!)
• Survey-takers were overwhelmingly Caucasian. Our real attendance through the doors of the museum is different than this, so it seems like we need to do a better job of reaching some different audiences.

We’ll be contacting the lucky winner of the iPod touch this week and sending out the love to them!  Thanks to everyone for helping us with the survey!  We’ll be back in touch as we put together a new set of user personas to use for some upcoming web work.

In the mean time, enjoy sifting through our data for us.  If you see anything interesting here, be sure to be one of those 49% who do comment on blogs, and Let Us Know!  We’re happy to answer any questions you ask!

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