Community Engagement through User Experience

Posted by Interactive Mechanics on April 10, 2017

Community Engagement through User Experience
Learn to put yourself in your users’ shoes
Thursday, April 27, 2-5 PM | Old City Philadelphia
http://interactivemechanics.com/workshops/

User Experience (UX) is how your visitors feels about a product or service, whether you’re designing a website, an exhibit, or a toaster. How do you know if your target audience is having a good or bad experience? Learn to put yourself in your users’ shoes in order to better understand their motivations, so that you can create a welcoming experience and make something that is useful, easy to use, and enjoyable for them.

We’ll cover the fundamentals of user experience, why it matters, and ways to convince others in your organization to invest in this process. We’ll detail a typical UX journey and common methodologies that are useful for museum professionals, emphasizing ways to engage new and existing communities along the way. We’ll practice research techniques, including interviews and contextual inquiries (observing the way your visitors already interact with your exhibits), that allow you to learn about your visitors’ objectives, rather than designing from assumptions. We’ll develop personas to clarify which new audiences you want to connect with, and what works best for them, asking questions like, Why aren’t they users already? What barriers does your museum present? What needs could you be meeting?

We’ll also review common techniques for evaluating digital content using activities like card sorting and content audits, and we’ll produce rapid prototypes for user testing to conduct evaluations and gather valuable feedback.

This workshop is for exhibit designers and developers, curators, content developers, museum technologists, and marketers. After this workshop, you’ll be able to:

*Implement user experience strategies to better understand new and existing audiences
*Convince others in your organization to adopt this process
*Conduct in-person interviews and contextual inquiry with visitors to learn about their goals and objectives
*Use activities like card sorting and content inventories to understand your digital content
*Produce quick analog and digital prototypes and conduct low-cost evaluations with visitors

If you have any questions, please contact Amelia Longo at amelia@interactivemechanics.com.

Interactive Mechanics is a digital design firm that partners with cultural and educational organizations on design, development, user experience, and strategy.