Over the last 12 months the Powerhouse, along with the National Museum of Australia and Museum Victoria, has been involved in supplying collection data to joint pilot project between the Le@rning Federation (TLF) and the Council of Australasian Museum Directors (CAMD) from March 2008 to May 2009 Museums have always had difficulty preparing material to [...]
Entries Tagged as 'User experience'
Will schools use collection content? The Learning Federation Pilot Report
July 15th, 2009 Comments Off
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Fictitional narratives & visitor-made labels – The Odditoreum
July 9th, 2009 3 Comments
At the Powerhouse we’ve just launched something called The Odditoreum. An incredibly low-tech “exhibition” with no technology-based interactive experiences and minimal web presence, The Odditoreum feels remarkable for the level of participation it is engendering. Visitors are actively writing their own labels for the objects and even before launch there was a lot of interest [...]
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A quick QR code update
April 8th, 2009 8 Comments
As regular readers know, we’ve been trialling QR codes and a little while back rolled them on a small selection of object labels in a Japanese fashion display. I’ve been keep an eye on their usage and some of the continuing problems around lighting, shadows, and low-resolution mobile phone cameras like the current iPhone 3G. [...]
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Readability – reducing clutter with a bookmarklet
March 4th, 2009 Comments Off
I’ve become a fan of a bookmarklet tool called Readability. What it does is remove the clutter from a content-rich webpage and optimise it for ‘readability’ (which of course, itself can be customised). Now museums tend to be serial offenders on text-heaviness – we love long text and I’m not one to argue that we [...]
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Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination opens and is immediately on the web
December 3rd, 2008 3 Comments
Tonight we had the official public opening of Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination. Already images and videos of the exhibition and the launch, taken by members of the public (“the people formerly known as the audience”) are starting to appear online across the social web. Here’s photos on Flickr and no doubt tomorrow there [...]
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dConstruct ‘Designing the social web’ 5 Sept 2008, Brighton UK
September 6th, 2008 4 Comments
dConstruct in Brighton this year was held in the full glory of an English beachside summer – sleeting rain and gusty winds. Inside the Brighton Dome, 700 web geeks gathered to hear what ended up being quite a mixed bag of presentations from speakers about various aspects of ‘designing the social web’. Light on the [...]
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More powerful browsers – Mozilla Labs Ubiquity
August 27th, 2008 1 Comment
Mozilla Labs has released Aza Raskin’s Ubiquity in an early alpha form. This is a glimpse into a future world of browser technology which brings notions of the semantic web directly into the browser and connects the dots between websites – not from a provider perspective, but from a user perspective. Ubiquity for Firefox from [...]
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Next generation of Photosynth-style image interaction – Bundler
August 18th, 2008 Comments Off
Last year there was a lot of buzz around the first demos on Microsoft’s Seadragon and Photosynth, now from SIGGRAPH08 comes this rather splendid update to underlying technologies and concepts. There is now a lot more ability for users to navigate and tweak their experience of interacting and browsing a 3D scene using miscellaneous 2D [...]
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Usability and IA testing tools – OptimalSort, ClickDensity, Silverback
August 10th, 2008 2 Comments
As the team has been working on a large array of new projects and sites of late we’ve been exploring some of the newer tools that have emerged for usability testing and ensuring good information architectures. Here’s some of what we’ve been exploring and using – We’ve started using Optimalsort for site architecture – especially [...]
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SEO (search engine optimisation) basics and museums
June 14th, 2008 Comments Off
One of the most common questions asked over the past few years has been “how do I get the best out of SEO for my museum?”. This comes up in casual conversations and without fail at conferences. We are all becoming increasingly aware of the higher and higher proportion of our traffic coming via search, [...]
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