Usability Study of a Public Culture Website for Improvement: A Case of Guangzhou Museum of Art

摘要

Museum websites usually possess a large number of high-quality content and their information is relatively objective and authoritative. So these websites are often used by researchers, visitors and other external users. The usability of museum website has a great impact on user's experience, which determines whether users can quickly obtain information and services in the easiest way especially for public culture site such as museum, which few have been done. In this paper, Guangzhou Museum of Art is selected as the experimental object of usability evaluation museum website. Through the methods of observation, discussion, thinking aloud protocol, questionnaire and mouse tracking, the usability of the website is evaluated by 10 university researchers in terms of efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. The results show that there are some problems in the usability of the website, such as content service form, overall structure, navigation design and so on. The lack of attention to user habits causes users' cognitive pressure. Suggestions are provided in the study to enhance the usability of these websites.