Museum Site

Problem

Users need information about a museum for the purpose of visiting it, getting information about the collection of the museum, or getting information about other activities of the museum.

Solution

Create an informative site focussing on the museum main collection, activities and visitor information. Complement the site by offering online ticket sales, memberships and online shop.

From www.guggenheim.com


Use when

You are designing a website for a museum. A site for a museum mainly acts as 'brochure' for the museum by giving all sorts of information which primarily is supposed to attract people to visiting the 'physical' museum. The main experience is one of Information Seeking that focusses on informing visitors. Secondary goals may involve raising funds or provide membership functionality, a first step to creating a Community Building experience. Currently most museum websites are not 'virtual' museums and usually stick to being an online 'brochure'. Nonetheless, this pattern also generally applies to a 'virtual' museum.

The target audience for a museum website is first of all formed by potential visitors. Other audiences are educators, students, investors, donators, curators, and researchers.

How

User tasks
There is a variety of user tasks that a museum site needs to support. These typically include: These user tasks are mostly relevant as pre-visiting activities while some are more relevant as post-visiting activities e.g. the shop and publications.

Typical site sections
Museum sites are quite standard and have a very high degree of similarity. Most sites offer the following sections:

Why

The most important functions of a museum website are the attraction of visitors and the selling of artifacts. It is also important to put information about the collection into the archives so that interested people could obtain that information.

More Examples


From www.louvre.fr/


From www.rijksmuseum.nl



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