Further to a recent article in Museums Aotearoa, I thought I’d share some of the things we do, behind the scenes, to help create effective websites.
1. Use personas to focus on your audience
First of all, get clear on your audience. It might seem obvious who they are (for example museum visitors) but by creating a set of personas to represent different members of your audience, their needs, and the opportunities they represent, will suddenly come to life. Once you’ve made the personas, print them out and keep them in your face. As you develop content and features for your site revisit your personas, to be sure they are relevant.
There’s more about personas, with examples, on an earlier blog about creating great content.
2. Create a moodboard of what's inspiring you
This is a good chance to evaluate what websites are inspirational to you, and your wider team. As you review them, ask yourself what's inspiring, and why? A moodboard of inspirational sites can trigger all kinds of ideas, but be brave and look beyond just other museum websites. What other visitor attractions, cultural organisations, galleries, story-based sites, or even pure entertainment websites do you think you could get some inspiration from?
Take a look at some of the links on our earlier blog about great content, to even see how annual reports can be inspiring.
And, here's some other links to get you thinking:
The inspiring forest– an interesting, collaborative, on-line exhibition of user-contributed animations. Supported by Google and Tate Modern
An example of using an iPad to physically navigate through a virtual story, in a real space. It’s the old Augmented reality idea, but a story-based example. Imagine a website that responds according to where the user is.
Yet another inspiring annual report– there’s no need to make reporting dull!
An interesting article about the future of online news which suggests much more dynamic information structures. Could your content respond to current topics of interest?
3. Make a (short) list of objectivesNext, create some objectives for what you want your website to achieve. What is its purpose?
- Is it there to increase visitor numbers?
- To get repeat visitations?
- To increase engagement with your collection?
- To reach a new audience, other than visitors (if so, who and where are they now)?
- To generate new content or ideas?
- To increase venue hires?
You should also consider people based objectives. What do you want someone who visits your website (ideally each of your personas) to think, feel or do as a result of visiting? How can you facilitate that on your site?
A good set of prioritized objectives should really help focus your website (and your budget). These will determine content areas, design focus and functions to be added.
4. What story are you telling?
Next, think about the content you have and what would work for your personas and the objectives set. So often museums reflect their exhibition structure on their websites, but this is a chance to be unrestricted by the physical display of your content onsite and to create stories and journeys through content that you may not in fact be able to do onsite.
Create some journeys through your content that your personas might take, given the chance to browse and meander. What structures and relationships between content do they suggest?
Why not use your website as a whole new way of engaging your audience?
Consider also what your audience will do on your website, and then where they might go next. Think beyond your own four walls, and what else the personas might want. Perhaps you could offer other things to continue their journey. Don't make it all about you - make it all about them and what else will keep them involved. How could you extend their experience?
5. What's the best way to be engaging?
Again, this is a good time to review the already mentioned blog post on creating great content and getting a variety of media employed, with examples.
User contributions are on everyone's lips, done well they can be compelling and fascinating. But equally, they can work against you. Seeing content with no likes, comments or shares just exposes a failure. If you want contributions, ask yourself why? Who in your personas will contribute and what will motivate them? How does it help meet your objectives?
Think too about how and why people will become engaged, and give them a reason to. You could pose questions (like the stuff daily quiz); or provoke by asking, for example, what the relationship is between two objects, and get the community discussing it; or asking people to identify content; or to add their own personal items to an online collection or story. You must give them a reason to start if you are to succeed.
6. Make sure your brief includes being responsive to users devices (and locations)
Your website should also be designed to respond to the variety of devices your audiences are likely to be on these days. If it hasn’t happened already on your site, then soon mobile will become the primary way people access you. Can you also be responsive as to their location, and serve up different information for those in and out of town? In and out of your building?
7. Test your site on real users
Running user testing on a sample of people (who broadly represent your range of personas) is a brilliant way to see where problems lie now, or to test ideas you are considering (paper testing can be effective, if done right), or to test a prototype site out before you go live. Proper user testing will cost some money to run, but it can save you serious costs or even embarrassment, and that’s priceless!
There are some interesting insights into user testing in this blog post on the development of a mobile app.
8. Should you extend into social media?
If you're examining other channels, like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, etc. then think carefully about why. What will you achieve there that you can't do on your website. They're all brilliant channels, but you have to be clear why you're there and how they fit in with your strategy.
Social media is simply too big to be ignored, at least without due consideration. But if you’re going to do it – do it well!
This, earlier blog post on how to get the best out of Facebook, may be worth reading if this is an area you are looking at.
Hopefully, that's a helpful list of things to think about as you get started. As long as you're focussed on your audience, and are open to looking at your stories with fresh eyes, you have the chance to do something extraordinary, even on an ordinary budget.