Affective textile and costume museum website design

Abstract

The aim of this study was to identify and investigate the main factors involved in the affective design of textile and costume museum websites. The research was focused upon on the issues of visual assessment and the reasons why people visit and stay on a museum website. The study was carried out to develop an understanding of the factors that attract people to use a museum website and how the affective use of design may change the visitor's attitude to and image of a museum. Museums are an important resource for fashion students and therefore the understanding of affective/emotional factors in website design is important.15 textile and costume museum web pages were presented to 144 subjects (74 UK university students and 70 Taiwanese university students) and a principal component analysis was carried out on a semantic differentiation exercise. The results of this Analysis indicated that the subjects' importance ratings for the design of the museum websites were significantly affected by three factors: visual impact, content quality and simplicity. The visual impact factor can be defined as an emotional axis, the content quality factor can be defined as a functional axis and the simplicity factor can be defined as a simplicity axis, these three factor axes contribute the main visual criteria by which individuals commonly judge the impression and value of museum websites. The cluster analysis showed that the website samples used in this survey could be broken into four basic categories or groups which were stylish, highly functional, poorly functional and traditional design.