Pseudonym: Jim

10/1/2018, 11:30 @ WCMA reading room Williams student, senior, male, has been to WCMA before and visits often, but not regularly (~2 times a year)

Who you observed or interviewed, their background, and the environment.

We interviewed a senior Williams student who will we refer to as Jim. He has been to WCMA before and visits occasionally (~2 times a year) to explore the exhibits. We conducted our inquiry in the reading room, having Jim sit on a couch with a laptop. There were no other museum visitors, which was helpful in creating a quiet, focused space.

What did you learn?

  • Photos really resonate: actually seeing what the building used to look like, being able to see the differences and similarities between then and now.
  • The Wikipedia model (hypertext) allows for interesting discoveries and creates various ‘paths’ for a user to explore. This model seems to be an effective way to keep a user engaged and something that we will keep in mind.

What tasks, problems, or opportunities did you uncover?

For our inquiry, we asked Jim to construct a timeline of WCMA’s history. He approached this by searching “WCMA history” on Google. He went on WCMA’s website and proceeded to the history section. Using their history webpage, Jim began constructing the timeline in chronological order.

Constructing a timeline became just a matter of copying and pasting the timeline from WCMA’s website. Thankfully, Jim went through each entry and decided whether or not to include it in his own. We should ensure that future participants also do not just copy the entire thing.

Did you encounter any difficulties establishing rapport or getting the information you need?

We did not encounter difficulties getting information we needed.

Discuss what remains to be pursued after your first inquiry. I fully expect changes will be necessary, as inquiries can be difficult to get right and often important topics are left unresolved. What are your plans for the remaining inquiries?

We want to do two other contextual inquiries with participants who aren’t frequent museum visitors. For our remaining contextual inquiries, we want to hone in on the pain points of potential users of our design.

How do you plan to change your protocol based on what you learned in your first inquiry?

I think it would be valuable if we could incorporate the ways in which people might explore the museum or talk to staff to learn more about their space (rather than solely looking things up online). This is something we’d need to discuss and think about with more specificity.