hiding our collections in plain site: interface strategies for findability

Hiding our Collections in Plain Site

Interface Strategiesfor Findability

(see speaker notes for context)

Nate Solas (@homebrewer)

Webmaster at the Walker Art Center

Today:

The problem

The numbers

Recommendations

Beyond the interface

ArtsConnectEd 1  (ACE1)

What do the logs tell us about how this interface is used?id timestamp term # user agent

187710 2008-04-28 12:03:21.043

fire 53 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

187711 2008-04-28 12:03:22.123

tropical beaches Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

187712 2008-04-28 12:03:26.233

water 148 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

187713 2008-04-28 12:03:27.170

nature and animals

25 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727)

Term Frequency

photographs 734

paintings 413

sculpture 275

arts 263

ceramics 169

pattern 156

photograph 150

landscape 123

masks 121

children 112

Top search terms in ACE 1

trying to browse?

part of an assignment?

"Term Facets"

Facet

Other

Artist names are big, then medium, and finally culture

Recovering session information (simplified)

Timestamp Term User Agent Session

1:10:01pm horse Firefox 3 1

1:10:45pm pony Firefox 3 1

1:12:22pm flower IE 7 2

1:30:12pm gallop Firefox 3 3

1:31:42pm portrait Firefox 3.5 4

1:33:08pm portrait Firefox 3 3

EFF showed user agent usually contains enough unique information to identify a user out of 1,500 others.

Combined with 3-minute session window = good enough.

Browsing the collection, circa 1990

Facet

Other

Coverage of the collection

+20% +100%

Time on site: easy to measure, hard to understand

Is your interface inviting deeper exploration, or is it just taking them forever to figure it out?

Still typing facet terms into the search box?

Recommendations

Prevent dead ends

You Should

Tell users (133)

How many (826)

Results (0)

To expect (26)

Bad Design

Makes

Them guess

What's behind

Each door

3x moredead ends!

Explain the "no results" page

Suggest speling spelling

Beyond the interface

No search engine can crawl this site

... unless you provide a sitemap

SEO+

Crawlable site+

Sitemap

=

Buzzword Bingo!

• microdata• microformats• RDFa

• Linked Open Data

The end.

All Stormtrooper photos via CC license at:http://www.flickr.com/photos/st3f4n/

Pic. of baby with book: by me