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What do users thinks about our current front page?

By: Dr Lynda Kelly, Category: Museullaneous, Date: 08 Aug 2011

Our intern, Marloes Schepers, interviewed twenty-one visitors to seek their opinion about our current front page. Here’s what they thought. 

What did they like?

• Navigation (7 comments) – well organised; clear; gives quick information
• Design (15 comments) – eye catching colours; images; layout and headings
• Features (9 comments) – top nav; search; opening hours/admission info on left
• Content (6 comments) – events and highlights; lots of info

What didn’t they like?
Lots of comments here!

• Navigation (18 comments) – stuffed (!); too much info; have to scroll down the page; use drop down menus; confusing
• Design (5 comments) – looks like Google; no differentiation between sections; no variety
• Features (1 comet) – too many separate links
• Content (13 comments) too much information; lots of text; highlights / exhibition / admissions info should be bigger

What do they think is on at the Museum now?

• Events (11 comments)
• Animals (4 comments) because of the images
• Insects (3 comments)
• Behind the scenes (2 comments)

MyMuseum – what is it about?
The idea behind MyMuseum is for users to join the site and make collections of their own favourite pages and other parts of the website. Most of those surveyed (and with 26 comments) were kind of on the right track, although 13 comments were not at all remotely what the function was about.

Other aspects
All could correctly figure out where to go for both admission prices and to contact the Museum. There was an overall very positive response to the colours used on the site (24 positive comments compared with 6 negative). The biggest criticism was when asked whether they thought there was too much on the page – only two positive compared with 27 negative comments, such as too much stuff; need bigger letters; need drop-down menus; quite intense.

Final thoughts from analysing the interview data

• There is a lot going on the page, but there are a lot of people who aren’t really bothered by that
• The links are marked with a picture, bold, blue and underlined – this is too much
• Most people would like to see on the home page a nice picture of an animal or so, a top row with drop down menus, and under the picture just the upcoming events with dates, admission prices and contact
• A picture of the Museum on the home page would be good for recognition
• Give people the opportunity to choose a language while visiting the site

Note that this is a small sample size and we will be doing a lot more work in this area. My next post looks at the actual use of the home page via our Google analytics statistics.