About This Project

Indiana State Museum Expert Review

Team project for Interaction Design Methods

Fall 2015

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The team conducted an expert review of Indiana State Museum website, combining two methods, cognitive walkthrough and heuristic evaluation. The key findings and recommendations were:

• TICKET PURCHASE is hard on this website for users. It will be more convenient for users to streamline the process of ticket purchasing online and also redesign the ticket page to eliminate wasted space.

• NAVIGATION BAR on the website’s top part have issues to indicate where users are currently and also fails to keep the experience of navigation clear and simple. The recommendation will be to redesign navigation bar, highlighting the page which users is currently browsing and removing redundant navigation components and methods.

• OPERATIONS on the website are sometimes confusing for users. No timely feedback is provided, and unexpected response of user actions happens on the website. Regarding how to solve these problems, the website should firstly focus on fixing the issues that are caused by normal user actions. For example, links or images that are not call-to-actions should be explicitly indicated. Then the website could move forward to improve error prevention.

• INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE of this website also reveals an issue of finding information efficiently. Exhibits and events which are the most attractive things on the website to users are not assigned the priority that they deserve. They are listed at the end of Visit menu, so as to be easily ignored by users. Reconsidering their positions in information architecture is needed, to ensure that information is reasonably organized on this website.

METHODOLOGY

For the Cognitive Walkthrough, the team used scenario-based approach. Five typical scenarios were considered in the process, and team members played a role of the user to try to finish the tasks defined in each scenario. Barriers that users may encounter in such scenarios are identified, and corresponding recommendations from the perspective of usability are provided in the cognitive walkthrough section.