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

Flickr Stats

omg. I can predict loads of time wasted navel-gazing here…..

Retracing My Dad’s Steps in Ethiopia

On my recent trip to Ethiopia I took along with me some copies of the photos my dad took while he lived there in 1962-64. Dad lived in Addis and among his photographs were some images of the neighborhood he lived in. I got him to show me on a map before hand, and in Addis I set off on a quest to find the same locations and document them again. It’s really amazing how little things have changed there. The trees are bigger, and some short walls have been made taller, but that’s about it.

Below, left, is an image from 1964 of the walkway/alley leading to the house my dad lived in with his roommate, Charlie, seen in the photo. Access to the house (the one with the chimney) and its yard was through the gate behind Charlie. On the right, I am standing in front of the same gate in 2008 (less than 2 weeks ago). The same gate is there–they just added wood to the top section and painted it green.

Below are two images of the street leading up to this alleyway, at the top of the “70 steps”. The top image is from ca. 1964 (Dad’s camera had a much nicer lens on it than my little Cannon digital Elph), the bottom one from today. You can see the same stone wall to the right (extended upwards today), and even the same green shack on the right of the telephone pole (also the same!).

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!

Finding my Roots in Luxembourg

Luxembourg is a tiny country sandwiched in between Belgium, France, and Germany. Amazingly, it has survived as a distinct state, with it´s own culture and language (Luetzeburgish) through over 1000 years. My grandfather´s family comes from this tiny country. And coincidentally, so does my friend Elizabeth´s grandfather. So we decided to rent a car and tour around this tiny country to see our heritage. It turns out that there are a load of Americans who have Luxemburg heritage. One of the employees in the town hall of Heffingen, Elizabeth´s ancestral home village, told us that many people from the town emigrated to the U.S. and he even has family in the small suburb of Chicago where E is from. The biug mystery for me is why my great grandfather and his wife emigrated to the U.S. in the 1814. Why then? It seems too early for the more usual emigration to the U.S. from Europe. Elizabeth´s grandfather emigrated in the 1940s, which is probably explained by WWII. The VERY catholic Luxembourgers were persecuted to a degree during Nazi occupation and were forced to declare German citizenship. I think that perhaps my family´s emigration may have had something to do with the aftermath of the French Revolution. My small amount of reading seems to indicate that things weren´t so great in the Grand Duchy at that time. In any case, today Luxembourgers are very proud of their hertitage and are also very interested in helping Americans who want to find their roots in this lovely little land.

I went to visit some of the villages where my ancestors came from. The main one is Useldange.
See all the photos on the Flickr set I created (I took too many

Random Technology-Tag RSS Pays off

A few weeks ago, I signed up for WordPress’ tag feed listing blog postings tagged with the word “technology”. You can imagine that this changes constantly. It’s fun to go check the current 5 most recent feeds and see what’s passing by. I tend to just read anything that catches my eye, which means that the author has to be writing a good subject line for me to take notice. What I am getting out of this is a sort of Twitter-like view into the technology blogging community. I feel the zeitgeit, even though I don’t have the comprehensive view.

Just now I saw this little gem: 7 Clever Google Tricks Worth Knowing. I have to say I barely knew any of these! As an art historian, I especially like #6 – “Judge a Site by its Images.”

Game Design and Learning Theory

I just read Daniel Cook’s article on Gamasutra, The Chemistry of Game Design. He uses the metaphor of alchemy to describe the way that game designers work: “We are still alchemists of our trade, mixing two parts impure story with one part polluted game play with three parts market voodoo.” He then goes on to codify a model for game design based on units he calls “skill atoms.” Each skill atom describes how an action by the player (press a button) results in a change in the computer simulation that is communicated to the user in the form of feedback (avatar jumps), which gives the player a sense of pleasure in learning a skill (“I can jump!”).

It’s a great article and a great model. What really blows my mind is that, to me, what he is describing is learning theory. The skill atoms describe learning goals, and the steps within are like the rubric in a lesson plan. Cook describes how these skill atoms are chained together to make a skill chain that defines the game. Well, that’s how learning standards for different grade levels are established!

Learning theory, education, and gaming theory are totally interconnected.

What is a Museum Podcast?

I have been busy lately working on what will be my institution’s first podcast. In the past year or so, the idea of doing a podcast has been bantied about among various staff, and you won’t be surprised that we have have all had to formulate an answer to the question “What is a podcast?” One of the things I discovered is that while we all agree what a podcast is, we don’t all agree on what a podcast can do for us as a museum. So I ask: “What is a museum podcast?”

By definition a podcast is an audio program (more and more including images and video as well) that is  fed to listeners via an RSS feed. The serial nature of the content and subscription to the series is one of the key elements in a podcast. The other element is the ability to transfer episodes to a portable device. Many researchers have recently shown that quite a few of us never transfer these podcasts to portable devices. A great article from last year by TDG Research focuses the question of defining a podcast around this questionable quality: portability. I would like to question the other quality of a podcast: the subscription-based, serial nature of the content.  Many museums are posting “podcasts” that are in fact not series at all. These are things like audio tours, lectures, gallery talks, and interviews that are posted as a podcast all at once, not serially. For example, a museum may post all 25 stops of an audio tour for an exhibition as a podcast. All 25 files are immediately available to download at once. The idea is that you will download them all to yout iPod and then bring it with you to the museum for your tour. (There are even many “unofficial” tours available, not created by the institution itself.) A museum may also decide to post a single lecture, gallery tour, or curator’s talk as a “podcast.” This audio file may exist within a larger podcast of other lectures and tours, but the event recorded was essentially a stand-alone event, not a series.

So, how would a museum create a true podcast that is a serial program? What would that content look like? The Museum of Science in Boston has done this, and it’s great. Content is tied to exhibitions at the museum and they bring in experts from the field to discuss various science topics. It’s fascinating. But, I am assuming,  it also requires a lot of staff time and effort to produce this content that is made (I assume) purely for the Internet audience. The lectures and gallery talks I was citing previously don’t take as much effort to produce, as they involve simply capturing audio from an on-site event, or audio tour, that is already exists anyway, despite its future incarnation as a podcast.  It seems to me that most museums (especially art museums) at this point would rather make a podcast as a way of repurposing content already created for another purpose. Is this compelling content for a podcast?

Part of the answer to this must lie in asking how people are actually using podcasts. It seems to me that many people may not listen to a podcast in its serial form at all . Some – and I am guilty of this – once they find a compelling podcast, download past episodes that seem interesting, and stop there. No subscription needed. Thus, once past episodes of a “podcast” are posted, they simply become audio files posted on the Internet. I have many friends who grab podcasts just this way. They don’t subscribe. Or even if they do, they still pick and choose which files to listen to once downloaded.

I am still thinking this through. But I have this question hovering over my head: Does it make sense to “podcast” non-serial content? If it is just about posting an audio file onto your web site, what is the added value of creating the “podcast” – or simply naming it that? One clear advantage is to make the audio available in the iTunes store, where users who may not otherwise find your content may find you. This is very important. But even there, is it still a “podcast”? Does it matter? Will people still listen?