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

PSA’s through cell-phone texting in China

This summer while visiting China I rented a cell phone (through yoyoor.com, excellent service btw). Almost immediately I began to get text messages in Chinese, which I assumed were advertising and spam–based on my minimal vocab of Chinese characters. But one day, I was on a plane to Beijing with a Chinese-speaking friend. When we landed we both received text messages on our phones at the same moment. My friend looked at his message and turned to me, waving his phone, “Welcome to Beijing!” I showed him my phone, “what does it say?!” The same exact message. All of my American sensibilities about privacy and personal space shuddered. Not only do “they” know where we are, and that we just arrived in a new city, but they were letting us know about it.

A few weeks later in Beijing, a few days after the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square “incident”, an American friend of mine who teaches at Tsinghua University told me that the day before the anniversary her students received text messages wishing them luck on their exams and telling them to “be good.” Clearly this message was targeted–only students received it–and was intended to influence public behavior through broadcast. Creepy.

Indeed, using text messaging to send out broadcast messages like this seems to be the norm in China. Just today I read about a text message the police in Urumqi sent out to the city’s citizens, warning them about recent attacks with syringe needles.

Really, this makes perfect sense. If you have a population that don’t all have TV, or radios, or access to the Internet, and a high penetration for cell phones, it is the perfect medium for broadcast. (Of course it helps that the government owns all the cell phone companies in the nation.) And yet to Westerners, getting direct text messages to our cell phones seems like an invasion. Our cell phones are so personal and intimate that getting messages from our government, uninvited, seems too personal. And yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if this begins to happen eventually in the West too. It will just take some time for us to get used to it.

NYT Reverses Paper-to-Web Workflow

Today, I was a little blown away by the Frugal Traveler’s article in the Sunday New York Times about ways to use new technologies to keep in touch with friends and family by voice while on the road. The content of the article was great.

But that’s not what struck me.  What struck me was a departure from the traditional print-to-web order of publishing an article–this article, Calling Home for Even Less, was originally published as a blog post by Matt Gros on the NYT Web site on August 18, where it has garnered 69 comments to date. In the analog version of the story, which landed on my doorstep this morning, the article was re-published in an abridged form along with a note that the “full” article can be found on the NYT web site. And that’s not all. A selection of the comments left on the blog were published in the paper edition alongside the article.

Shazam! Web publishing now drives print in newspapers. See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?

fanfou, twitter, blogs, nciku.com, and google translator working together

I am leaving or China in 5 days and thought I would check to see how possible it would be to post to Twitter from China. I will be renting a cell phone, but text messages to the US are expensive, and texting to Twitter from China means sending an SMS to the U.K. A quick google search turned up this very helpful workaround from Pandapassport: sign up for Fanfou.com, China’s version of Twitter, then send the feed to Twitter using Twitterfeed. Nifty. But fanfou is all in Chinese! I managed to sign up for fanfou (jolifanta’s fanfou page) by deciphering some basic Chinese. Fanfou’s UI is exactly like Twitter, so I could pretty much guess what the text was based on placement on Twitter. I had some help in this with nciku.com, my favorite online Chinese dictionary, which lets you DRAW the characters! You just need a basic knowledge of stroke order rules and voila, you can look up any word without knowing those pesky radicals.

Signing up for twitterfeed was easy in comparison (although I have yet to see my fanfou upodate appear in my Twitter feed…crossing my fingers). Next problem–how to verify my Chinese phone for fanfou?? Crap, my Chinese isn’t good enough to tackle this: despite the photos, I have no idea what this is saying. It is way too much for nciku translation, one character at a time. So I tried Google agian. I googled the url for this page and in google search results hit “translate” – voila! “No plug rice blog!” Well, yeah, it’s not the perfect translation, but it was enough for me to get the gist. And I could even navigate within the translator to other pages, where I found the SMS phone number that I will (hopefully) be able to use to send updates to fanfou. Phew…we’ll find out in a few days if all this works.

The Zine Goes Glossy

HP’s new MagCloud service allows anyone with a computer and some design skillz to publish glossy magazines. This kind of self-publishing was the realm of hand-crafted zines. (Check out the cool new NYT slideshow+audio presentation too!). View the slideshow.

Read the article at NYT.com.

On Publishing Travel Photos and Stories for Posterity

I returned from my trip to Ethiopia on June 15. Six weeks later I have shared the photos and stories with many people and in many formats! I decided to take the time to be really organized and comb carefully through all of my photos (1,000+) to choose the best, and to place them in order and caption them to re-tell the story of my trip, my thoughts, experiences, and recollections. (See the highlights of my Ethiopia trip here.) After going on a number of trips over the past 3 years, I have learned that if I don’t do this right away, it just doesn’t happen. And then all my memories slowly slip away. I look at the photos 3 years later and wonder what I was thinking when I took them. So this time, I had a really strong sense of “it’s now or never” driving me to organize, annotate, and share. And having the ability to post everything online and share with friends across the globe was a great motivator too. There’s a real sense here of not just creating a record of my traveling experiences for me and my friends, but of contributing to a larger education (in the West) about the country and history of Ethiopia, as well as about the joy of travel.

This trip was also unusual because of my family connection to the country. Soon after I returned back to L.A., I gave a pecha kucha slideshow (20 slides, 20 seconds each) presentation about my trip and my dad’s life living there, in which I reconstructed some of his photos from the early 60s. That, in turn, inspired me to re-create the slideshow on Flickr. And then from there, I decided to create a book, which I published myself on Lulu.com, based on the pecha kucha: Connecting to History in Ethiopia, A Travel Reconstruction.

Flickr Stats

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

Dangers of Facebook

scene: 11:45 a.m., at work, madly multitasking at my desk

phone rings *ring, ring*

me: Hello.

co-worker: Hi, how are you?

me: I’m fine, what’s up?

co-worker: your Facebook status doesn’t say you’re fine

doh!

Museums & the Web 2008 Sound Bytes

A few of the great things I have heard here in Montreal at the Museums & the Web conference. Apologies if I got some of these attributions wrong; I can’t read my own handwriting.

Re: IP and Fair Use: “We in the non-profit sector need to talk the talk and walk the walk. If we want a robust public domain, we need to treat it as a true public domain. —Michael Geist, opening plenary

“Objecthood doesn’t have a place in the world unless someone is making use of it.” —Olafur Eliasson, as quoted by Peter Samis who went on to cogently point out that this statement calls into question the very basis of value in most museums, the object.

Re: a blog SFMOMA created for the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, which invited contributions from users: “We invited the public into the room, asked them to tell us what they think, and then we left the room.” —Peter Samis

“Demographics are descriptive, not predictive.” —this was a comment by an attendee in the session Engaging Museum Audiences.

“People coming to museums are feeding their own idea of who they are by going to a museum. They are testing out identities.” —I believe this was Gabrielle Trépanier

Re: standardizing data for sharing: “It’s good enough.” —Frankie Roberto

“When you look closely at all the organization of our systems, it’s actually a mess….Mess is good….How do we smoosh it all?” —Seb Chan

“We sell experiences in the leisure market, not just information. People can get information from Wikipedia. What we offer is an experience.” —Seb Chan

“Scarcity vs. Scale: In the old model, the value of an object is determined by it’s scarcity. In the new model, scale and proliferation may be where value lies.” —Mike Ellis

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.