The graph below shows that most people are really intrigued by the possibilities of accessing mobile content from their own devices, follow by slightly fewer respondents who felt like they’d prefer to rent a device that was guaranteed to work.  If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know that we most recently released a tour for the 100 Acres park that anyone with a internet-capable smartphone can experience. (visit http://www.imamuseum.org/ on your mobile phone and look for 100 Acres)  Internally at the IMA we’re still looking for that “right” balance between devices that we maintain and a user’s own device.  We’d be interested in your feedback in the comments if you have a good thought or opinion.

In trying to fish about for the kinds of content most people were itching to get their hands on, I used the results to come up with a ranking of the types of content that people responded to the most.  I simply added the percentages of “Yeah, definately” and “Can’t get enough” together for a total positive response.  Removing museum staff responses from the mix yielded the same rank ordering. The rankings came out as follows.  I  think I’m most surprised by how poorly Games rated in this ranking, and had expected it to do much better.

1. Hear from Artists (90%)
2. Behind the Scenes (83%)
3. Hear from Experts (54%)
4. High-Res Images (51%)
5. Ways to Express Opinion (44%)
6. Things to Take Away (41%)
7. Games (27%)

Responses were pretty evenly split on which kinds of tours we should create next with preferences expressed for tours of the permanent collection and the gardens and grounds.  Again, the rankings did not change when museum staff were removed from the responses.

This statistic is pretty hilarious to me.  Apparently, museum tours are informative, but boring!  Funny enough, it seems like museum professionals are the most critical of their own tours.  The non-museum respondents had better overall opinions of museum tours than that of the museum staff.  Seems like maybe we’re being a bit too hard on ourselves as museum staff and should focus on delivering a flexible experience with deep content as described above.

Responses from those who DO work in museums

Responses from those who DO NOT work in museums

For completeness, here are the remaining two questions regarding a little bit about the survey respondents. Overall not a huge dataset, but I think a really meaningful representative set for this museum anyways!

Have it Your Way!

Well, our intrepid team of media and software guru’s are busy preparing to launch our first outdoor mobile content tour to highlight the opening of 100 Acres this weekend.  Folks are a little bit frazzled and wishing for the sunshine, but I think we’re all universally excited about the incredible stories there are to tell in the park.

While we’ve ironed out our initial set of tour content for 100 Acres, we could use your help in planning the next great escapades we undertake for mobile content.  So, in the great tradition of McDonalds… if you could “Have it Your Way”, what should our next mobile tour look like?

If you’ll answer a few of these questions, I promise to come back next week and share with the class all we’ve learned from your responses!  We’ll take the best ideas from this survey and see if we can wrap them into our next mobile tour!

Thank You! -Rob

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!

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!

Last October, a team of us who work on Previews sat down with stacks of magazines from all walks of life, including publications from other museums. We talked about appearance — the layout, design, fonts, colors, photos. We hashed out content — article type, member information, length, the calendar. We also considered the paper used to print the magazine on and asked ourselves ‘How green can we be?’

I found that vibrant oranges, rich browns and jewel tones were the hot colors to carry through a publication. These colors are used effectively by most of the design museums like the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt. Type face was modern and mixed, but it was clear readability is key. The Art Institute of Chicago went further to portray pages with kid’s programs with more playful fonts and design themes. The use of large, vivid, expressive images was and is always impressive.

Content ranged from the wildly popular features on exhibitions and upcoming programming to artist profiles and member interviews. The Walker in Minneapolis does an excellent job of highlighting a member, possibly picked right off the street, for a Q&A and an always inviting snapshot. And my favorite idea from the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego is a “take-away” poster of their upcoming or current exhibition inside the magazine. This is no Jonathan Taylor Thomas.

After a passionate discussion (and far past the scheduled meeting time), everyone still had their own favorites. If our decided mission is to be an award-winning publication to our readers/members, why not ask their opinion? We included the survey below in the spring 2008 issue and received incredible feedback. (Thank you all.)

Members, watch your mailboxes in April for your summer Previews issue. And keep telling us what you think. If you’re not a member and would like to join the IMA to begin receiving this perk, you can join the family here.

A shout out to Art for You, coming to mailboxes before Previews, and a disclaimer that the institutions mentioned above may or may not contain the content I praised them for. There were A LOT of magazines on that table.