Category: Web metrics

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External Reference Sites Interactive Media Web 2.0 Web metrics

Demos report on Culture Online UK

Yesterday Demos UK released their report Logging On: Culture, participation and the web. It is available as a free download or can be purchased in a printed form.

In the brief history of the internet, the cultural sector has followed two related paths: on the one hand, the digitisation of content and provision of information and, on the other, interactivity and opportunities for expression. Some have seen these as in binary opposition. The truth is that they are inexorably merging. But the big question is where do we go next? How can policy intervention best meet with technology to achieve the aim of bringing about a more democratic culture? What will be the role, opportunities and limitations of online culture in a rapidly changing world?

A moment of reflection is provided by the coming to an end, in March 2007, of the Culture Online initiative funded by the Department for Culture,Media and Sport. Culture Online provides both an interesting case study, bringing together lessons learnt about how to organise online engagement, and a point of departure for asking questions about future directions.

The report is notable for its recommendations for future directions (smaller, agency-led entrepreneurial initiatives that interact/inter-operate with each other) and lessons about how to successfully implement online projects that effectively engage communities. As the report explains, the shift to networked initiatives and new styles of working will not be without difficulties – new organisational models within the public sector will need to be found to accommodate and nurture entrepreneurial talents.

The cultural sector is, almost by definition, at the forefront of innovation. Experimentation in models of organisation are as necessary as new expressions of cultural content. The cultural sector and the organisations that mediate and enable the sector could and should have a role to play in trying out new forms of technology, especially in highlighting non-market or emerging market fields.

Thank you to Daniel Pett at the British Museum for alerting me to this report.

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Interactive Media Social networking Web metrics

Ubiquitous system ethics

Coming hot on the heels of all this talk of tracking user behaviour, Adam Greenfield proposes five ethical guidelines for ubiqitous systems in a recent keynote:

(1) all ubiquitous systems should default to harmlessness.

(2) ubiquitous systems should be self-disclosing (e.g. be clearly perceptible, “seamlesness” must be an optional mode of operation). proposal of 5 different graphical icons to disclose capabilities of an object (see first image above the post).

(3) be conservative of face, so that ubiquitous systems do not unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate or shame their users.

(4) ubiquitous systems should be conservative of time, not introduce undue complications into ordinary operations.

(5) ubiquitous systems should be deniable, offer users the ability to opt out, always & at any point

(via the rather excellent Information Aesthetics)

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Web 2.0 Web metrics

Watching users interact with your site – Robot Replay

There are so many new ‘analytics’ tools springing up. A while back I wrote about Clickdensity who also recently presented at Museums & the Web. Clickdensity’s heat mapping has been an excellent tool for us to better understand how real world users have been using elements of our navigation and screen design. Clickdensity’s visualisation of mouseclicks and navigation makes it instantly possible to see what works and what doesn’t.

Robot Replay is a new free service that uses similar Javascript technology to Clickdensity but records videos of user sessions. This can show you how users spend time moving their mouse around your pages trying to work out what to click on next, rather than just showing where they clicked (assuming they did). Used in conjunction with other tools Robot Replay could, in time, potentially supplant the expensive ‘watch the users’ focus group evaluations that most museums use when redesigning their sites.

Robot Replay certainly isn’t a magic bullet on its own and it needs to be used with many other tools. The ‘replays’ are a bit clunky and show that this is still very much in development. Visualising multiple user sessions is best done via Clickdensity or other heat mapping tools, and log file analysis still offers the best overall picture – but there are some exciting possibilities beginning to open up.

Even if you aren’t redesigning, surely you are curious as to how your current site is actually being used.

A word of caution, you may need to look at your privacy policy to ensure that your use of these tools is in keeping with, in our case, maintaining anonymity of the user and only identifying them by IP address. You need to be very careful that you are recording only only parts of the site where no personally identifying information is being entered – don’t go using it to test your ecommerce site . . . .

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Web metrics

The new Google Analytics

Avinash Kaushik writes a very detailed post about the new-look Google Analytics that is rolling out across accounts right now.

Now, more than ever web analytics are essential. In my experience, web analytics at museums have been the last thing on people’s busy timetables. Most organisations report the most basic level of statistics to their funding bodies and leave it at that, yet they offer the best and most immediate opportunity to see exactly what users are doing on your site and how they are using it.

Google Analytics is free. And because of this, the new version is going to put a lot of pressure on vendors whose commercial solutions are charged on usage or fixed fee models. Also, it puts a lot of pressure on the slightly underdone open source solutions which, whilst also ‘free’, don’t offer the level of detail and analysis that the new look Google Analytics does.

The question for some organisations will be – do you want all your usage data to be held by Google?

But if you have a site where adding the necessary tracking code to a common sitewide page element is relatively easy then I’d suggest the new look version is certainly worth trialling – even if in tandem with your existing package to compare accuracy.

Google’s official announcement post also available.

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Museum blogging Social networking Web 2.0 Web metrics Young people & museums

More on levels of participation / Forrester’s “social technographics”

In a most timely fashion for our recent discussions of ‘levels of participation’, from Forrester’s comes the ‘Social Technographics‘ report.

This is a very interesting and relevant report to all the museum sector. It breaks down user-types into several categories and then maps the differing proportions of each category as represented across different social media websites.

I particularly like their breakdown of users into creators, critics, collectors, joiners, spectators and inactives. Their call for companies and others to analyse how their customers might fit into these categories before creating their ‘social strategy’ is timely, post MW2007. I would expect that in comparison to larger corporate social sites, museums are most likely to have their major audiences less likely to be creators and that we should be encouraging a growth in critics – who most likely align with our existing strategies and long-time organisational strengths in encouraging and managing academic criticism.

Also, looking at their figures for the different user breakdowns between sites classifying as ‘entertainment’ (more participatory) and ‘family’ (less likely to be participatory), our sector needs to be conscious of how our sites appear to our audiences.

Those who have looked at our recent website for parents and young children – Play at Powerhouse – will notice we haven’t included any ‘social’ elements. We did an analysis of who the likely users of the site were going to be, considered their time constraints, and focussed on producing a site full of offline interactive activities (we’ve just added 4 new craft activities), and visit-related content. As the audience for the site grows, we will be adding social elements.

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MW2007 Social networking Web 2.0 Web metrics Young people & museums

Levels of participation / community

I’m still waiting for the actual Hitwise figures to be released but Red Herring reports on Bill Tancer’s presentation at the Web2.0 conference/expo.

A tiny 0.16 percent of visits to Google’s top video-sharing site, YouTube, are by users seeking to upload video for others to watch, according to a study of online surfing data by Bill Tancer, an analyst with Web audience measurement firm Hitwise.

Similarly, only two-tenths of 1 percent of visits to Flickr, a popular photo-editing site owned by Yahoo, are to upload new photos, the Hitwise study found.

The vast majority of visitors are the Internet equivalent of the television generation’s couch potatoes―voyeurs who like to watch rather than create, Mr. Tancer’s statistics show.

We already knew this.

What is interesting is that the popularity of these sites and similar is not reliant on content upload-style participation. Indeed, the report continues,

Visits by web users to the category of participatory Web 2.0 sites account for 12 percent of U.S. web activity, up from only 2 percent two years ago, the study showed.

Web 2.0 photo-sharing sites now account for 56 percent of visits to all online photo sites. Of that, Photobucket alone accounts for 41 percent of the traffic, Hitwise data shows.

An older, first generation of sites, now in the minority, are photo-finishing sites that give users the ability to store, share, and print photos.

This reaffirms the importance of having different levels of content participation – and the primacy of content, the truism that has been around since the birth of the web. Most of your userbase will be lurkers, viewers – they won’t contribute – but if you can leverage and re-present the proportionally small amount of user-generated content you do get, then you are likely to be able to ride a wave of interest in your site.

At Museums & the Web this year everyone was floored by the efforts of the Brooklyn Museum who have managed to build a strong user community around their online presence (they even have a top level navigation called ‘Community’). Whilst a superficial look at the Brooklyn Museum might suggest that this is because of their use of technology – Flickr groups in particular, I’d suggest their success is a result of their existing strong ties with the local community, of which the Flickr groups and image upload participation is a logical extension of their mission. What Flickr offers the museum is many-fold. Firstly there is new traffic – leveraging the existing Flickr audience (much in the same way Ideum’s work with the Maxwell has); secondly Flickr’s API makes for easy presentation and integration on the Brooklyn’s own website.

Does that mean when I visit I will be uploading my photos? Probably not. Whilst I have a Flickr account (first barrier to participation overcome) and have a comfort level with Flickr (second barrier to participation overcome), I am not a part of the Brooklyn Museum community, I am just a casual visitor. As a result the incentive for me to participate is low. I am more than happy to lend my eyeballs to their site and browse at their pre-existing Flickr galleries though which results in the Brooklyn getting more of my attention and traffic (along with Flickr). Brooklyn is leveraging Flickr for Flickr’s community.

So, again I come back to the point that museums need to find ways of effectively optimising the network effects of what little traffic we get. One user contribution should spark the interest of one thousand lurkers, rather than requiring one thousand contributions from other users. This shouldn’t be surprising, but it is more difficult than you think. How can you make one Flickr image on your site be more powerful than an online forum on your site with just one singular post in it?

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Interactive Media MW2007 Web metrics

M&W07 – Day three: Usability lab

The Usability Lab sessions are fascinating dissections of museum websites. A potential user is taken out of the room whilst the website owner explains their site and suggests two popular tasks to be performed by the tester when they return to the room. Marty and Twiddle explain their rapid testing methodology behind these sessions over at First Monday.

I sat in on the testing of a fellow museum’s website and it was painful to see the semantic disconnect between the sort of common terms that the user might search for and the actual naming of menu items – surely a ‘discount ticket’ or a ‘multi-venue ticket’ would be called that rather than a name that sounded more like an exhibition title? Overly text heavy pages with embedded links forced the novice user to scan blocks of text for what they were looking for – as if they were scanning a print brochure – rather than offering quick links to frequently used and important sections.

In many ways the experience reminded me a lot of the pain of the old Powerhouse Museum website – where the organisation had defined its external presence using its own language, rather than the language of the users. And where we had a site that users had to navigate in the ways internal staff thought about the organisation (and what was important) as opposed to by what the users logically wanted to do.

(the Powerhouse Museum site back in 2001)

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Museum blogging MW2007 Web 2.0 Web metrics

M&W07 – Day three: Radical Trust – State of the Museum Blogosphere

Jim Spadaccini and I have just finished presenting our mini-workshop surveying the museum blogosphere.

The detailed results are online at Archimuse, and the slides including updated data are available here.

(update – Nate at Walker Art has posted some discussion of the q&a at the end of the presentation)

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MW2007 Web 2.0 Web metrics

M&W07 – Day two:Peacock & Brownbill on audiences, visitors, and users

Because of timetable clashes I missed Darren Peacock and Johnny Brownbill’s presentation on the evaluation work that has gone into the forthcoming redevelopment of the Museum Victoria website.

Their hybrid model of ‘integrated analysis’ of a museum website is a solid approach that addresses many of the holes in other more traditional models. Of course it has to be seen whether this new means of analysis can produce a better website down the track.


(from Peacock & Brownbill)

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Collection databases Web 2.0 Web metrics

OPAC2.2 – New look and new features on our collection database

Today we have also made live a slightly enhanced version of our collection database search.

You will notice a few useful cosmetic usability tweaks such as the tabbed navigation bar at the top which allows you to quickly get to the tag cloud and the top level of category browsing. We did this to make it easier for users who landed on an object to be able to get access to the tags and categories, as well as the search. We have also removed the tag cloud and category browser from the front page and prettied it up with a few selected objects which can act as entry points.

Under the hood we have done some optimising of the ‘related searches’ and also improved the ability for searching for foreign characters which we noticed weren’t previously searchable. We have also added a stack of new images (with still many more to come) and quite a few new acquisitions.

My paper (Tagging and Searching – Serendipity and museum collection databases) for Museums & the Web 2007 which gives a background to the OPAC project and presents some preliminary results from our ever growing datastore is now online.

Those who will be present for the paper in San Francisco will get an updated set of statistics as well as quite a bit of material that couldn’t be fitted into the written version.