Crit Rooms

Experienced Web designers and new media managers review real museum Web sites and offer their comments in the "Crit Room". Modeled on the art school critique, Web sites are volunteered in advance by MW2008 attendees who are present to pose the problem and respond.

Sheila Carey chairs a session on evauation in web spaces.

Beth Kanter {see http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/] on evaluating social media talks about moving beyond measuring static use of web sites to get at ways of appreciating the impact of social media.She cites Scoble: audience, engagement, loyalty, influence, and action for some principles that help understand the impact of a site in a social media context. Overally, she notes that trends are more important than actual numbers, as many of these measures (such as ) are hard to quantify. See socialmediametrics.wikispaces.com for a link to her slides.

Tim Hart introduces analytics as used at the Getty Trust, and the challenges of adapting measures that are e-commerce focused to mission-driven organizations. As an example, he looks at a page from the Getty Museum Site. The click map shows that people are going to the things that the page highlight; netgenesis stats show more detail, that lets you compare clicks to actual usage?. it makes it clear that many people link deep into the site, and that section pages aren't necessarily seen. but bot and spider traffic are a significant number of page views and need to be removed (javascript based tools can help filter those out). trends are more important than actual numbers. Metrics need to be compared to other measures, including interviews, visits ...

I've just discovered that Informal Science has the VSA archive online:

"Full articles from The Visitor Studies Association's archive of Visitor Behavior, Visitor Studies Today, (1998 - 2006) and Visitor Studies: theory, research and practice (1988-1996) are now available for search and download through a collaboration between InformalScience.org and the Visitor Studies Association.

For access to full articles published after 2006, please go to Visitor Studies the new VSA journal published by Routledge."

See http://www2.informalscience.org/vsa to search the archive

Thanks for a great addition to freely accessible research resources online!

/jt

We really value the feedback that we get about what works at Museums and the Web, and what doesn't. Please complete a conference evaluation, either on-site (the bright blue page in your conference bag), or if you didn't submit one at the conference, complete it on-line.

You can also post comments here.

Thanks!

/jennifer

i opened a chat room during crit room 1 -- but ended up talking to myself: here's the transcript.

/jt