YOU our IMA Blog Readers!
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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!

Developing Steve User Personae

The group of project members come from all walks of the museum life.  Using their backgrounds we performed an exercise in user-centered design.  We developed personae of more than 100 fictitious individuals who might use the tools we will develop in some shape or form.  Using these people as reference we then wrote scenarios describing how these users would specifically use tools we might develop.  The final outcome was a list of approximately 250 requirements to satisfy the developed scenarios.  The NMC, who is administering the grant, guided us through this process which I found very effective.

Please check out the website for the current IMLS grant.

We also posted our pictures from the trip.