As a contract Research Assistant with The Field Museum, I worked with the Evaluation specialist to conduct a usability study for the recently completed Tour Application. Despite signs around the museum to advertise this app, it appeared that not many visitors were utilizing it. We wanted to know the pain points of this app and why visitors weren’t using it. With this information, both the app and general visitor experience could be improved.

METHODOLOGY:

Since we desired to know how easy/difficult it was to use the app, we opted for usability testing. I intercepted visitors on the floor of the museum to use the pre-loaded app on either an Android or iPhone, depending on their preference. Sampling for this project was difficult because we were not able to offer incentives and many visitors viewed the study as a disruption of their time. For this reason data collection took an extra week, but I was able to collect over 50 responses for five different features of the app.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS:

While we were mostly interested in evaluating our finished app, we needed to first understand why visitors might use a museum app. Thus the two main questions for this research were:

• What do visitors want from a museum app?
• How easy/difficult is this app to use?

MY ROLE:

I worked with the in-house evaluation specialist who collaborated with developers to find the research question and fine tune the interview guide. I was the principle data collector for this study. I intercepted visitors to interview and take detailed notes as they used the app. Additionally, I collected all the data into Excel, created a codebook from the responses and used qualitative coding to categorize the answers. The evaluation specialist then took this data and created a report for stakeholders.

 

Skills Highlight:

• Usability Testing
• Interviews
• Excel

RESULTS:

The results of the study showed that visitors much preferred a practical museum app with features such as a map or calendar.

Though they were excited about the idea of a tour app, the interface was often difficult to navigate. After the study finished, it was decided that overhauling the app was not financially feasible and it was discontinued.

This was my first usability study and cemented my belief that usability research is important during all stages of development in order to reduce disconnect between developers and end users.