5 types of user experience, by John Falk

This week the OCLC held a Digital Forum West mini conference/symposium at the Getty. I noticed that John Falk was the keynote speaker and weaseled my way in to see his talk, since I am a huge fan and was very curious how his influential theories about free-choice learning in museums might be applied to the problem of digital access.

His talk this morning was especially interesting because his theory about user experiences dovetails with newer approaches to thinking of web visitors in terms of the kind of experience they want, rather than as more traditional audience types (teacher, mom, family, businessman, retired person) and demographics (age, sex, race, location).

Falk argued that looking at traditional demographic info and quantitative measurement of “traffic” (to our physical and virtual sites) is pretty meaningless and doesn’t help museums and libraries achieve their goals. For example, knowing how many 30-year-old Hispanics come to the museum/library is not going to help us figure out how to get more 30-year-old Hispanics to come. Also, knowing someone’s demographic info doesn’t tell you anything about their needs–what they want from us when they come here.

Instead, he thinks we should start to think about our users in terms of their needs, which dictate the kind of experiences they are seeking from us. Based on his almost 40 years of research in the field, he has come up with 5 “experience types” which he says are pretty much universal in all people, regardless of demographic. These describe basic human needs. They are:

Explorers–motivated by personal curiosity (i.e. browsers)
Facilitators–motivated by other people and their needs (i.e. a parent bringing a child)
Experience-Seekers–motivated by the desire to see and experience a place (i.e. tourists)
Professional/Hobbyists–motivated by specific knowledge-related goals (i.e. a scholar researching a specific topic)
Rechargers–motivated by a desire for a contemplative or restorative experience

One person can experience different experience types at different moments. So, one day I may go to a museum with my family because I want to show them something (Facilitator), another day I may go there because I am researching a painting and need to see it (Professional/Hobbyist), and another day I may just want to go there with no specific goal except to discover what’s on view and be surprised (Explorer). Falk argued that this is information we can really use to develop new methods for evaluation.

Another part of his argument (he has authored many books on this) is that a visitor’s experiences with us is just a tiny blip in the larger trajectory of their lives. How does this experience at a museum or library affect that trajectory? And isn’t that what we really want to know? How are we affecting people’s learning? How can we be better perceived as useful to them in fulfilling their needs?

He talked about the research he’s done with the California Science Center here in L.A. He’s been doing visitor surveys for 15 years and, in one example, has been able to show that one exhibition at the science center actually did teach visitors a science concept (biostasis) that they remembered 2 years later.

A friend told me his newest book covers this theory: Identity and the Museum Experience

Visual Literacy for College Freshmen

At U Penn this year, incoming Freshmen are taking a twist on the old classic summer reading project. Instead of reading a novel together, they are looking at a painting, Thomas Eakins’ Gross Clinic. This painting is rich with historical and cultural meaning, and opens the door to study of many topics, from American history, to medical practice and history, to psychological studies, and oh yeah, art history too. I love this painting and spent weeks in an art history seminar in grad school (ehem) dissecting it.  The university is using the project as a way to create community bonds between the local arts organizations and the students, between campus and community.

But I love it because it foregrounds the importance of visual literacy, something that I have always felt is ignored in our culture (it’s not one of the three Rs), yet which is becoming increasingly important in our world where we’re swamped with imagery. Learning how to evaluate what you see and interpret meaning from images is not innate; it is a learned skill. Reading, in my mind, is no longer just about interpreting the syntax of  spoken and written language. It’s heartening to see a major university embracing a visual expression as a way to explore and read about larger historical and cultural issues.

Managing Expectations in Museums

Following on the Museums and the Web conference last week, Nina Simon made an excellent observation in a great blog post Avoiding the Participatory Ghetto: Are Museums Evolving with their Innovative Web Strategies?:

“Are participatory activities happening on the web because that is the best place for them? Or is the web the dumping ground for activities too messy or uncomfortable to do onsite?”

She goes on to describe the disconnect she felt when visiting the Indianapolis Museum of Art, after visiting their super-Web 2.0 Web site. It was just a normal museum, not what she’d expected from a museum with such a participatory Web site, famous for its transparency that lays bare the inner workings of the institution. There’s a great conversation in the comments to her post among Museum technologists and staff about the nature of participation in museums (it’s a good read!). I feel like we really need to ask ourselves, What do we expect visitors will do on our virtual and real world sites? Do they have to do the same types of activities in both spaces? On one level, Nina’s right. There is a disconnect. But is it fair to compare? I also have a similar disconnect between my real-world home and my FaceBook home. The real one is decidedly quiet. It’s where I study, and eat, and sleep, and play with the dog . While the FB home is really loud with tons of people streaming through, taking quizzes, and posting photos *all the time* because I have friends all over the world. I am not saying that museums don’t have anything to learn from online social media. I just ask about what we expect from these different spaces. As the comments on Nina’s post show, it is very instructiveto think this through , but is it fair to compare?

Debit Card Fraud

This post begins with a big old sigh: >> S I G H <<

I have been had.
I don’t know by whom, or how, but someone has been using my debit card number at gas stations in another state on the opposite coast from where I live. Thankfully, Washington Mutual noticed the odd behavior and called me on Monday to let me know that there were some “suspicious” transactions on Sunday. They told me to watch my account and report to them any transactions I did not authorize to their fraud department.

I am lucky. I have only had about $400 taken from my account, and I had enough in my account that I didn’t accrue any overdraft charges. And, my bank caught it and called me. Kudos to WaMu (I hope they live up to these kudos by honoring my claim and covering the stolen money).

Here’s what I learned from the experience, both from my bank, and from doing a little bit of research:

All the transactions were at a gas station – perhaps that is the connection. I do pay for gas with my debit card. My card information may have been taken when I swiped it at a gas station by a card skimmer. A quick search on google revealed numerous recent reports of card skimming scams at gas stations. Here are a few:
SFGate article (5/30/08), “San Jose gas station center of debit card scam”
SeattlePI (07/21/08) “Puyallup gas station customers scammed in debit card fraud”

One person I talked to in the Fraud dept at WaMu told me that transactions from gas stations take longer to post to the bank than most. I wonder if this is an opportunity for thieves – the longer it takes to post, the less likely you’ll notice in a timely manner. It buys them time.

Paying with a credit card is probably safer. It’s not a direct line to the cash in your account the way debit is. And credit cards often have strict fraud processes built in for their customers’ protection. A few articles I read online mention a recent rise in debit card fraud. Here’s an article from Reader’s Digest that suggests some ways to protect yourself: “Avoid these Debit Card Traps”.

I also learned that there are different kinds of cards banks issue. The old-school ATM cards, which allowed you to take cash out of an ATM machine, were not debit cards. Many banks stopped issuing these in favor of the Visa or MC-sponsored debit card. They get a cut of the action when these cards are used. Some consumer advocate groups are pushing to reinstate the plain old ATM cards. Here’s an article from PIRG on the topic: PIRG Consumer Fact Sheet on ATM/Debit cards (there’s no date on this page and I suspect it may have been posted a while ago, but much of the information still seems relevant.)

Stay safe and guard your debit card!

Blogging in Museums (as discussed at MW2008)

It’s been a while since I have posted (long enough for me to not notice WordPress updated their interface – ack!) and what better inspiration to get me writing again than a blogging workshop at the Museums & the Web conference! I am at the conference in Montreal and participated in this great session hosted by Brian Kelley and Mike Ellis. What made it great? Mostly the discussion with colleagues from other museums from all over – mostly North America, the UK and New Zealand. We shared our experiences with blogs, got some great ideas about how to make them successful, and whether to do them at all. One participant, arkrausehardie, posted a great summary of the sessuion on the M&W Conference Blog: Blogging with Master Bloggers Mike Ellis and Brian Kelley.

For me, the best bits were the brainstorming and advice about how to promote the benefits of blogging in museums. This largely amounts to quelling fears about opening up the institution to comments from “anyone.” But it seems clear that the building-community potential of a blog is huge. The opportunity a blog can offer for a museum to be open and honest and build trust with an online audience should be embraced, not feared (easier said than done). I also liked that Mike pointed out that a blog can help you maximize what you already do. And Brian and a few participants in the session made the point that if you’re not going to embrace the spirit of the blog — with non-institutional language, allowing unmoderated comments, and a simpler workflow for approving posts than most publications in museums have — then you should just not do it.

I agree. And yet, many of the most successful blogs I have seen are peer-to-peer blogs. Museum staff writing about our work, “thinking out loud” as Brian said it, to our peers. I am still wondering what makes a successful blog for our visitors? And I am still wondering who is going to write that blog? Maybe most of the blogs coming out of museums now are about technology in museums because the people inclined to blog at the moment are the technologists in museums? (Indeed, most blogs out there are peer-to-peer. Most bloggers write for themselves, don’t they?) I think a blogger needs to feel the compulsion to blog, to write. How do we tap into the great voices in our institutions and get them inspired to write…in their own voices?

The other thing that really struck me in the session was the advocacy for starting blogs about your institution, or associated with your institution, on your own. This is the spirit of the Web, right? To do so,  Brian and Mike advocated for clarity about ownership of the blog and stating clear policies about posts. This just opens up, for me, the huge Pandora’s box of personal vs. professional activities. Where do you draw the line? I am starting to think that in this day and age, the line is decidedly dotted.

My First Mandarin Class

I had my first Mandarin Chinese class last night and it was awesome! I learned a very cool tidbit of language history (a secret passion of mine). The English phrase “long time, no see” actually comes from the Chinese phrase—hǎo jiǔ bú jiàn, which literally translates to “(good) long time no see”. Googling it, I found quite a few vague references attributing this to the Chinese-English trade in the 1800s.
(It took me a few minutes to find the ASCII character entities for the 3rd pinyin tone! Here they are on everything2.com.)

I also found MIT’s awesome Opencourseware. They have Chinese classes available and I am going to try and use those materials in parallel with my class to reinforce the learning.

Digital Gaming Teaches Kids in Schools

Here is an awesome blog post from Global Kidz about the things students are learning inside and around digital games, and how they learn about social resistance and working the system (some very real-worls skills) while doing so.

[staff reflections] Gaming the DOE – be sure to read beyond the GTA anecdote at the top (which is great).

This story sends me back to my readings in Anthropology in grad school and one of my favorite scholars of social resistance, James Scott. This could be an example in his seminal book on the topic Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts.

Past Exhibitions Archives

Yesterday I drove behind the Orange Curtain to catch the last day of the exhibition Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury at Orange County’s gem of a little art museum, the Orange County Museum of Art.  I was going to write a blog post about the awesome human size of this museum, how wonderful it is to see experimentation in exhibition design and content in a little museum (I watched a clip from Dobie Gillis and Road Runner cartoons!), and what an inspiring snapshot of California history was represented here.

But I went to the OCMA Web site  to find a link to the info about the show and saw something way cool – an archive of *all* of their exhibitions, going back to 1962! Most of the exhibitions are only represented by a title and dates for the show. But it’s there! I was interested to find out that Chris Burden had a 20-year retrospective at OCMA in 1988, and Rico Lebrun had exhibits there in 1999 and 1964 (he painted a mural in a building in the Village Green, a housing experiment from the 1940s, and a national historic landmark here in LA.), and an exhibition in 1978 with the intriguing title The Figure: More or Less. I honestly have never seen this on a museum Web site. Others must be doing it….and more should!

New Year’s Reading

I am gradually coming out of my December hibernation (during which I did a lot of knitting and cooking) and have been scanning the ethernet over the past couple of days, seeing what’s new out there. Reading, absorbing. As usual, Beth’s Blog is superbly entertaining and useful. She and others have been writing a lot about Twitter lately. A colleague also sent me a link to an excellent blog about education and technology on PBS’s site called Learning.now. There, I discovered Twittories, which are basically exquisite-corpse-like stories written collaboratively in 140-word episodes using Twitter posts. Super cool! I subscribed to one Twittory authored by a class of middle schoolers.

Another hot topic out there seems to be finding new ways to learn from and leverage user traffic and search data. Through Seb Chan’s post on the Pwerhouse museum blog I discovered the New York Times’ awesome (i.e. incredibly useful) blog Open. Yesterday on this blog the NYT announced a new feature using their search data to cluster queries. It’s called Also Try. Of course, Seb is interested in this because of his own work with metrics on the Museum front. And then there was the study by some folks at UTAustin to de-anonymize a sub-set of Netflix data. Yikes! This is scary stuff. This study was referenced by quite a few posts that I found through my wordpress technology tag feed such as “Breaking the Netflix Prize Dataset“.

Finally, I played some games. A paper on the Journal of Online Education led me to this great wiki: Teaching Educational Games Resource. There is a link to a great documentary there about the current state of the video game world: Beyond Pong. Then I found Larry Ferlazzo’s list of the top 10 online learning games of 2007. That list kept me busy. My favorites there were Launchball and Qtoro (I noticed quite a few British sites on this list, especially from the BBC – somebody across the pond knows what’s up!). Qtoro is a sort of social networking site merged with trivial pursuit. I predict that something revolutionary will happen here….

The History of Video Games

Two very cool articles about the historicization of video games through a new program at the University of Texas. I wonder what the time-frame is for anything to become written down and archived as history? Let’s see….video games emerged in the 1970s (or earlier? does anyone know?). It’s 2007, so that’s 35+ years, or half a lifetime. So perhaps, the answer is just as long as it takes for a video-game-playing kid to grow up and become an historian and start his or her own archive.

Article in Ars Technica about University of Texas video game collection archive.

Article on APM’s Marketplace about the UT archive.