1. User Requirements in the Cultural Heritage Domain
Jennifer Marlow
The University of Sheffield

2. MultiMatch Design Process
Needs Assessment / Task Analysis
Low-fidelity Prototype & Evaluation
Redesign
Interactive Prototype
Heuristic Evaluation
Design
Prototype
Evaluate

3. Requirements Gathering
Important aspect of user-centred design
Who are the potential users and what are their needs?
3 target groups:
Academics
CH professionals
Tourists

4. Sources of User Needs Literature and past research Pre-existing sites
Log file analysis
User studies and interviews
Cultural heritage professionals/experts

5. Literature Review
Past work on information/search needs of professionals
Focus on relationships

6. Competitor Analysis
Goal: See which functionalities are most common to other CH web sites
Which features are standard/optional?

7. Survey of functionalities (56 CH sites)
Free text search
91 %
Browse by category
71 %
Advanced search
70 %
Multilingual
34 %
Geographical search
29 %
Show “More like this”
Timeline / Search by time
25 %
Controlled vocabulary
9 %
Colour/layout search
7 %
Query translation
5 %
Faceted browse 3%

8. Analysis of Log Files Category Site Categorisation of top 100 Queries
Named Entities
Subject
Place
Time
Art
Tate Online 63 36 2 1
General CH
WIND 66 24 7 3
Literature
Cervantes 73
Photography
Alinari 33 29 39
St Andrews 10 25 64
Example Queries: Van Gogh
Surrealism
Florence
Middle Ages

9. User Studies and Interviews
Carried out focus groups and interviews
Educational users
Video professionals
Image professionals
Information gained about
The tasks that users perform (both typical and challenging)
Their multilingual and multimedia requirements
Examples of use and suggestions for improvement

10. Task analysis Reliance on Internet search for everyday work
Finding material for presentations/clients, fact-checking details, background research
Sources used: Internal and external sites

11. Search characteristics
Reinforced previous findings
Names, places, dates, titles, subjects
Giotto self-portrait
“The Man Midwife”
People on strike

12. Multimedia requirements
Text
Images
Video
Audio
Percentage
of users
interacting
with media
type
100%
87%
47% 7%

13. Multilingual requirements
Significant language barriers serving as block to obtaining information
Some reliance on dictionaries to assist in cross-language searching
More support required

14. Multimedia Interaction (video)

15. Scenarios Will form the basis for tasks presented in user evaluation
Cover various user groups
Example:
CH professional
Searching for video footage on Pier Paolo Pasolini, needs to gather background info on who he was
Text, Images, Video
English, Dutch

16. Design impacts Prototype 1: Aggregate material
Query translation options
Enhanced multimedia interaction

17. Default Interface

18. Multilingual Search

19. Multimedia (video search)

20. Design impact (ctd.) Final prototype:
Enhanced aggregation/categorization
Enable faceted search/browse; semantic navigation

23. Future directions User-centred evaluation for the first prototype
to gain additional feedback and make sure the system continues to develop in accordance with user needs