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!

According to a recent BBC News article citing a study by Heriot Watt University, music can enhance wine taste. On the same principle, can music enhance art taste? Does the taste of a one type of wine or the shade of a certain color wall effect your like or dislike for a work of art?

From my perspective, it must. A recent example of my user-experience comes from this year’s Indiana State Fair. Being a veteran 4-H’er, I’m always impressed at the increasing talent I see in the photography exhibit, including a creative/experimental category for those who like to play in the digital world. The photography exhibits are displayed in the same buildings, and bunched together on the same white walls, shrink wrapped in plastic just as they always have been. The smell of swine mixed with cotten candy wafts through the exhibit. It’s all part of the signature fair experience. I can only imagine what those photographs must look like framed on the wall of a home or art gallery with proper lighting and plenty of breathing room.

In a museum, exhibition design is usually a department unto itself. Wall colors, lighting and graphic design elements are selected with the goal of creating a canvas that best compliments an exhibition or individual work of art. The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery does an exceptional job of making portraits pop, which got the attention of The Washington Post. Viewer experience is key. One sign of flattery is when visitors ask the museum staff for the specific paint number of a gallery so they can use it in their own homes. Sometimes, installation art and site-specific art does the work of the exhibit design team by taking into account the environment in which the work of art lives and the viewers’ total experience. In this way, the artist has more absolute control.

Should artists recommend the ideal environment in which to view their work, what song to listen to while looking at it, or what bottle to pop before feasting? Or should the viewer create their own unique experience or simply rely on the curator or museum to provide that for them?

Below are some works of art from the IMA. Share your music or wine recommendations for these or other favorite works:

• “Two Figures” 1968 sculpture by Barbara Hepworth
• “Phenomena Danger – Pass Left” by Paul Jenkins
• “Electric Chair” by Andy Warhol

Photo Credit: Hugh Talman, Smithsonian Institution
John Updike by Alex Katz; David Hockney Self-Portrait; Phil III by Chuck Close; and Self-Portrait with Liz by Red Grooms, as installed in “Americans Now,” National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.