Abstract
Museums are increasing access to their collections and providing richer user experiences via web-based interfaces. However, they are seeing high numbers of users looking at only one or two pages within 10 s and then leaving. To reduce this rate, a better understanding of the type of user who visits a museum website is required. Existing models for museum website users tend to focus on groups that are readily accessible for study or provide little detail in their definitions of the groups. This paper presents the results of a large-scale user survey for the National Museums Liverpool museum website in which data on a wide range of user characteristics were collected regarding their current visit to provide a better understanding of their motivations, tasks, engagement and domain knowledge. Results show that the frequently understudied general public and non-professional users make up the majority (approximately 77%) of the respondents.
Highlights
Museums have expanded their web-based offerings, providing access to general information about the museums, and direct access to their holdings, digital collections and online exhibits
We investigate the range of users interacting with the National Museums Liverpool (NML) website based on the multiple factors previously mentioned to better understand how these connect or vary according to the type of user, especially the general public and non-professional groups, which have received less attention
One of the limitations of past studies is that they have provided only very limited details on what characterises the individual user groups. We address this limitation for the “general public” and “non-professional” groups, by providing details on who the users are, what they have come to NML’s website for, how they interact with the website, what their level of knowledge is and what content they are looking at
Summary
Museums have expanded their web-based offerings, providing access to general information about the museums, and direct access to their holdings, digital collections and online exhibits. Many studies have sought to determine the information behaviour of users with various demographics, domains, professions and roles [5,13] Such studies have highlighted the diversity of users with respect to age, gender, personality, interests, expertise, profession, role, socio-economic background, motivation, intent and task. Users with a lack of archival expertise may find formulating search request, interpreting and contextualising search results difficult [14] Knowing this would allow specific search aids to be designed and implemented to support these users. As Skov & Ingwersen [41, p.92] highlight: “Understanding online museum visitor behaviour is critical to the development of relevant and useful museum websites”
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