web-based, open-source
collections management software for museums and more
User Centered Design is a way of designing a product from its users' perspective by carefully considering their goals, needs, and limitations. Designers often lack domain knowledge, so in order to anticipate and design for how the users would interact with the system, designers need to thoroughly understand the users, their tasks, and their contexts in which they work. But how?
User Centered Design happens in many stages and iterations. At the initial stage, designers learn as much as they can about the users, using techniques such as observation, interviews, and surveys. Based on this, designers come up with requirements for what they are about to design. They then translate these requirements into a visual format, using wireframes which are sketches of the system that we show people to communicate our ideas. Designers frequently go to the users for feedback throughout this design process, to modify and improve the wireframes. This way, most of the obvious errors are fixed and we are left with a design that accommodates users' behavior.
In the beginning of the project, some of the CollectionSpace team members were only vaguely familiar with managing collections. In order to design and build a collections management system (CMS), we needed to ramp up our knowledge on what museum professionals do to organize information about their collections. To gain such understanding, the design team visited a number of partnering museums in the U.S. and U.K. to meet with their registrars and collections managers. Talking with CMS users in their natural work environment has helped us understand the context of their work, what types of objects and information they deal with daily, and what tasks they perform with their existing CMSs.
In addition to visiting the users, we hosted design workshops to garner further input. We invited a roomful of museum professionals and facilitated discussions around what CollectionSpace should support. They were able to tell us what their current systems do, what is working well, what is not, and what they would like to see in a new CMS. Our Functional team and Design team gathered all of this information, teased out the essential features, and prioritized them.
The Design team started off by discussing the overall structure of the application as well as the layout for each of the pages. We sketched out our design ideas using Illustrator and created a series of wireframes that described the interactions. The wireframes were first reviewed by our functional team, who are domain experts and CMS users themselves. We then went back to the drawing board to incorporate their feedback. Every feature we currently have has gone through many of these iterations.
Our wireframes are regularly seen and evaluated by users from the community as well as our domain expert team members. We casually meet with users on the phone, over Skype, or in person and have them walk through a few key tasks with us. We call these sessions user testing. Users are encouraged to verbalize their thoughts as they go through the tasks. We then analyze users' comments and behavior that we observed to recommend design improvements.
Many users that we've spoken to are delighted by the design we produced through this iterative process. But there is plenty of room for improvement. We will continue to involve users and improve the design. Particularly, we want to make CollectionSpace accessible by users of all technical and physical abilities. If you are a CMS user and are interested, we would love to invite you to test our designs with us!