Museums and the Web 2009 - Starting Points for Discussion 

• Game application vs. traditional audio/video tour
• Serves Pre-visit, onsite visit, post-visit, and non-visit

Simplicity

• Clutter makes for a bad experience.  Try not to offer too many choices.

Ease of Use

• This where the old adage of "So easy your mother could do it." comes into play. 

UI is Instructive

• Using the user interface to direct the visitor.  e.g. Arrows point to a next page.

Digestible 

• Video or audio segments are small enough to not annoy the visitor.  Language or ideas are easy to understand.

Signage

• Visitor knows when and where information is available.  They also know how to access that information.

Draft Outline of Nancy's keynote presentation: 'Top 10 Tips for a successful mobile solution' 

1.   It’s not about the technology

a.    Focus on user experience and content

b.   Design for your audience’s needs

c.    Design for your museum’s needs

d.   Use the simplest technology solution available that will meet those needs

2. It is about the story; speak to your visitors’
   1. Heads: Answer questions, give insights
   2. Hearts: Create an emotion, atmosphere, time or place
   3. Hands: Inspire a response - create, contribute, sign up, come back
3. Think about voice
   1. Who is the most interesting person to your audience to guide them?
   2. Some common crowd-pleasers:

                                               i.     Artists

                                             ii.     Experts

                                            iii.     Other visitors

4. Think about context
   1. Private device / public context
   2. Multi-tasking and the museum ‘shuffle’ as visitors choreograph their museum experience by sampling input and activities from a range of different sources, both inside and outside the museum
   3. What is a comfortable unit of content in the mobile context? (long enough to be valuable, short enough to be easy to digest)
5. Think globally…
   1. WWW = Our visitors expect to experience the museum and its content Whatever, Wherever, Whenever they wish
   2. Design for the distributed museum which exists on a range of distribution platforms including those not controlled by the museum (YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, etc.…), not for walled gardens (be they the bricks & mortar museum or its website)
6. But act locally
   1. Not only is mobile different, but
   2. Different mobile platforms support different kinds of experiences.
   3. Choose the platform that meets the need;
   4. Develop content for the kind of experience that platform supports.
7. Distinguish between content & technology
   1. Some common confusions:

                                               i.     Do your visitors love the device or the content?

                                             ii.     Fear of the screen as eyetrap is a content, not a technology issue

8. Move to web standards
   1. Combine best practice from mobile (audiotours provide the largest database)
   2. With web-standard interfaces to content: familiar, tried & tested, simple to use, direct
9. Aim to turn visitors into teachers and ambassadors
   1. Why should our visitors’ Web 2.0 lives stop at the museum’s threshold?
   2. Voting to learn
   3. Aide-mémoires
   4. Souvenirs
   5. User-generated content (UGC)
   6. Sharing
10. And into your partners
    1. Research the needs of both the audiences you have…
    2. And the audiences you want
    3. Tell them how you’re responding and what you’re offering (signage, marketing)
    4. Take tours, try mobile solutions everywhere to ensure your solution continues to keep pace with visitors’ needs and cultural practices