What’s holding us back? True stories of user-centred content design at the Science Museum Group
This blog post is a version of the presentation given as part of the Professional Forum: What’s Holding Us Back? True Stories Of User-Centered Design at the MuseWeb 2019 conference.
Background
Since 2016, we have been working with Frankly, Green + Webb to understand our online audiences and to incorporate these insights and data into creating a new strand of content to tell the stories behind the objects in our collection, which would be published in the Objects and Stories section of each Science Museum Group museum website.
The intention of these stories is to be visually engaging longer reads (c.800 words), which showcase our curatorial knowledge and research, and contextualise one or more objects in our collection. By being trustworthy sources for information, we intend to grow our online audience and build a go-to destination for our subject areas.
To adhere to our strategic principles and objectives, we wanted to take a user-centred content design process (identify the audience; understand their requirements; test some potential content solutions; evaluate findings; use it to improve our content; re-test) and apply it to the creation of our new content strand.
In addition, we wanted to create a sustainable process for our internal web team to be able to deliver this new content strand.
This blog post will outline what we did as part of a user-centred content design process, what we learnt, what we changed and where we faced (and continue to face) challenges in implementing changes.
What did we do?
Research our audiences
Previously the Science Museum Group had produced various legacy content websites, which broadly fell into the category of “story” content. Each was delivered through specific siloed projects and — once published — both the content and technologies were left untouched.
Some sites had a lot of web traffic, which provided a good opportunity to understand our current audiences. Using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods we were able to find out: who were they, why were they coming, what were they looking for and how they rated our current content.
From this we were able to target an online audience that was valuable to us, and one that we could grow, and, crucially, define them as a group that was distinct from audiences looking to plan a museum visit.
Develop content principles
Based on this newly defined online audience — and the insights into their motivations and behaviours — we worked with Frankly, Green + Webb to develop a set of content principles.
These principles enabled us to work through legacy content and commission new content in line with our online audience’s needs, as well as align to our current brand and tone of voice.
Engage stakeholders
We were lucky that this work dovetailed with two major projects in London: Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries and One Collection: Revealing the Science Museum Group Collection.
This enabled us to create specific workflows with key stakeholder groups, such as our curatorial and marketing colleagues, and engage them in this methodology of creating digital content.
What we learnt?
Our audience surprised us
Our original proposition for this content strand was to create long-form content to tell the stories of our collection in the vein of a Snowfall or, more recently, the in-depth media rich longer reads found on sites like the BBC.
However, we discovered that we didn’t have a “lean back” audience who was keen to sit and read long content pieces. Instead, our audience was coming with a starting point in mind: a question, topic, nugget they wanted to find out more about. They had an agenda, an initiating enquiry. Importantly, this agenda very rarely started with an object.
And — as much as it bruised the ego — they weren’t specifically looking for our museums.
Our team is lean
As an organisation, we are lucky to have a designated Digital team with permanent members of staff — both editorial and technical.
However, as we workshopped an editorial process to create these new content strands it came to light the number of different hats we’d be asking our team to wear: editors; producers; image researchers; proof-readers; analysts to name but a few.
This meant creating a process that would be sustainable with the resources available to us.
What we changed following our user-centred research
A new content approach
Taking on board our audience insights, we changed our approach to the content we were creating: rather than creating content for a passive audience to read; we started to think about creating content for an active audience wanting to find out an answer.
Creating easy-to-scan content chunks around defined topics, using a mix of media to showcase information, integrating SEO tools into our creation process were some of the things we tested and implemented.
A new editorial process
We established a more structured editorial workflow.
Key changes involved early collaboration with our curatorial team (our content writers) to share audience and SEO insights, i.e. making sure our defined audience was at the centre of any content created.
We also established a process so that at least two of our digital team members work on content as it is created. We are a multisite organisation, with team members working at different locations. Encouraging collaboration within our team meant everyone would know what content was being created, and we could all learn and share information as we went.
Internal champions
We used “internal champions” on other teams — such as our curatorial team — to help advocate for this new content strand, and this way of working.
Collaborating on our process and incorporating their feedback early meant that they could help us to shape how we talked about the audience, content and process in language that was familiar to other internal stakeholders, and work out where the pinch points were as content was created.
Where we still have challenges
An adaptable process
Our organisation is multisite, and each museum works and engages its teams in different ways.
We have tested our editorial process on two projects, but we also have to listen to our local colleagues and adapt our process to suit individual museum approaches. At the same time, we have to be true to putting our audience first and not stretching our team resource too thin.
We are addressing this with small experimental projects across each museum to understand where our existing process works (or doesn’t work).
A long institutional memory
Whilst having legacy content from previous digital projects was an interesting starting point to understand our current and future audience, and offered a point of comparison for what we wanted to achieve today, it also brought with it an institutional memory of previous successes and failures.
It has been a challenge to re-frame our current work in this context.
We are addressing this by being transparent about our work and our ongoing findings: that even if something doesn’t work as expected we can still learn from it and incorporate insights into future work.
Conclusions
Incorporating a user-centred content design process has been invaluable in helping us to define and shape our online audience, create content for this audience and communicate our findings back to the organisation.
We are also planning to have an ongoing feedback loop to continue to gain audience insight and incorporate findings into future work.
We have ongoing challenges to address but initial feedback has suggested that our story content is growing traffic and is received positively by our audience.
Acknowledgements
With thanks to Frankly, Green + Webb, who helped us to work through this audience research project.
