The MET Museum's 'Perspectives' Usability Evaluation for Mobile
Case Studies
We, a group of four graduate students from Pratt Institute, New York, collaborated with the MET museum in order to understand the usability of the perspectives page. Our goal was to improve the findability and usability of the MET’s perspective page.
Our methodology began with defining our research questions. After this, we recruited 9 participants via a screening test that we created. 5 out of 9 participants that we recruited considered themselves art experts and had visited the MET before. Once the recruitment was done, we conducted each participant's eye-tracking test in the Pratt usability lab. We backed our findings with those we received from Google Analytics and Hotjar. Finally, we came up with 3 significant findings and recommendations which we finally presented to our clients.
Prototype and Presentation: Click Here
Figma, Zoom, Tobii Eye-tracking device
Objectives
Our objective was to understand the current user experience and expectations of the Met ‘Perspectives’ mobile webpage to inform the Met’s future product roadmap for this portion of the site.
Scope
Our scope was to conduct 9 in-person eye-tracking sessions with retroactive think-aloud sessions and investigate findings with behavioral data.
The pages of focus were: ‘Perspectives’ homepage and ‘The Visual Games of Juan Gris.’
Target Audience
Non-experts in art history for eye-tracking and general mobile audiences for Google Analytics.
Our Process
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Once we finished pilot testing sessions to test the tasks and tools used in the study such as Tobii Pro eye-tracking device, we began our process with screening and recruiting participants to conduct an Eye-tracking study. A research ops team was formed to combine recruitment efforts and prepare a screening questionnaire that aimed at understanding users’ educational background, demographics, their interest in pursuing graduate or undergraduate education and to ensure the recruitment of ideal participants for the most accurate results.
We divided our study into parts which started with Eye Tracking to analyze user eye interactions with the website, then provided a System Usability Scale form to understand the usability and learnability of the website, and ended with a Retrospective Think Aloud process where participants were encouraged to express their reasoning, challenges and liking while interacting with the website.
On completing the eye-tracking sessions, using Google Sheets, we placed all the responses of our participants. On Fig-jam and Figma, we segregated and clustered all the responses together based on like and importance.
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We received our behavior analytics data from Google Analytics. Behavior analytics is used to track and analyze website traffic and user behavior. However, it does not provide direct feedback from the users. Instead, it is combined with other usability testing methods to provide a more complete picture of the interface’s usability.
We were also able to collect traffic analysis findings which gave us information on the number of visitors on the website and where they came from.
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Users found the ‘Articles, videos and podcast’ labels intuitive but expressed confusion when landing on a page titled ‘Perspectives’ due to inconsistency in labeling.
Eye-tracking-
Behavior analytics-
a. 1.24% of mobile traffic is going from Home to Perspectives indicates that the page is not being found or is not attracting visitors.
b. Users are approx. 10x more likely to go back to the homepage after going to the Perspectives page from the homepage than to any other page.
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The user expects additional categorizations like content type and keywords to quickly and easily refine and narrow down their search results.
Behavior analytics-
A high bounce rate indicates that visitors are not finding what they are looking for quickly / easily.
All Visitors (Mobile)- Bounce Rate 69.85%
Perspective Visitors (Mobile)- Bounce Rate 75.86%
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Users do not realize there is a way to view a whole media type selection and are more likely to settle for only clicking on one article one at a time.
Behavior Analytics-
A scroll map shows that, of 16 randomly sampled users, most indeed scroll the length of the Perspectives homepage.
Eye-tracking-
No eye-tracking participant found the “All Podcasts” page when told to “Look for the Met’s podcasts.
Content type filters -
We could add chips like ‘Articles’ & ‘videos’ below the page title that would introduce page content and allow content refinement. This would help the users understand the content of the page better
Mobile-friendly drop-down menu -
We could condense the horizontal top navigation bar into a dropdown navigation menu with additional content categorization for better interaction and easy search via mobile.
Page Labels-
We could use respective page labels to give the users a sense of where they are, how they got to a certain page, and where they might want to go. essentially it would help the users navigate around the page.
Search ‘Perspectives’-
Showing results within ‘perspectives’ helps users to find and refine content easily.
Similarly, the visual consistency of filter options can improve search efficiency.
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Icons on images are often missed at first glance & users are not understanding them quickly enough.
Almost all the participants tend to overlook most of the icons. In a lot of cases, they did not seem to notice it at all.
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The text seems to be the most viewed content when users skim through the page. The images are looked at less often and the icons do not seem to be looked at at all.
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Introduce icons at the top of the page-
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Prepare users to look for icons by including them in all content-
As noticed, the inclusion of icons was very inconsistent. So, adding icons to missing content types like ‘Articles’ would help with consistency and make sure the icons were not overlooked.
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The Retrospective Think Aloud participants reported that they wanted but couldn’t find-
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Eye-tracking-
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In our final meeting, our team delivered a presentation with all our insights, findings, and recommendations to our client, The MET Museum. The client greatly appreciated the thoroughness of the study and how it provided them with data that highlighted some of the issues that have already been a part of the conversations and debate amongst the stakeholders about the future and further changes for the design and development of the project.
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This was one of the most interesting projects I have worked on to date. Our study highlighted the challenges faced by users while navigating through the ‘Perspectives’ page of the MET website, it also helped us understand the reasons for low traffic on the perspectives page. The client wanted us to understand the current user experience of the page and understand the traffic flow there, we were able to do so via our user testing sessions with the Tobii-eye tracker, Google Analytics, and Hotjar. Overall, this was a very good experience and opportunity for me.
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