Museums and the Web Conference 2015 http://mw2015.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/finding-the-motivation-behind-a-click-definition-and-implementation-of-a-website-audience-segmentation/
Advanced Machine Learning for Business Professionals
Finding the motivation behind a click: Tate's website segmentation
1. Finding the motivation
behind a click: definition
and implementation of a
website audience
segmentation
John Stack, former Head of Digital, Tate. Now Digital Director at the Science Museum Group
(@stacker)
Elena Villaespesa, former Digital Analyst, Tate. Now Digital Media Analyst, The Metropolitan
Museum of Art (@elenustika) / elena.villaespesa@metmuseum.org
Intro – JS
Me > Tate / Met
Agenda – presentation of what I have learned doing segmentation at Tate, other museums, my experience during the Let’s get real project (led by Culture 24) and now my current thinking to approach this work at the Met: the experience in the definition of a segmentation but also how to implement it so the audience is put at the heart of the decision-making process
Objective: audience-centre driven, staff use digital but also know who our audiences are. missing a holistic and high-quality user experience
Why you need a segmentation:
Tate’s website content – holistic view of the user
Create a shared language in the museum: when people create a project – who is it for? People respond: everyone, general audience, our public, new audiences…
Not all our audiences are the same – expectations and needs are different, ways of reaching, connecting with them… > influences targetting, content creation, experience design
Depending on the organisational needs (CRM, you need to see why type of segmentation fits to achieve your goals.
Research objectives:
Improve user experience
Understand better who our users are, and enable us to communicate this within the organisation
Understand the role of the website in a physical gallery visit
Methodology
Google Analytics (eg. looking at an image)
Research online collection
Survey on the whole website (2000 responses)
You can do different type of segmentation work. Eg. demographics, Google analytics: device, traffic source, by content visited…
In the case of Tate and at the Met what we needed was a motivation segmentation because one of the main goals is to improve the user experience.
While most of the users come for intellectual purposes, this actually encompasses a range of learning and research objectives, educational levels, and habits. The second largest group of visits are those related to visit planning—users checking what’s on and practical information such as opening times, location, or building facilities. In a lower percentage of visit modes, we can find visitors seeking inspiration or looking for a more aesthetic and emotional experience—browsing through images and other art visual content. Other motivations to visit the website include users searching for art news or looking for organisational information about Tate.
Visitors to the website have different levels of art knowledge. While 30 percent of our visitors see themselves as having a specialist knowledge of art, 70 percent have little or a general knowledge of the topic. Their needs and expectations vary depending on their knowledge. We should keep this in mind to provide different ways for our visitors to enjoy and understand art, as well as options for users to create their own experience and meaning. Furthermore, the knowledge-of-art variable is highly correlated to visitor’s vocational connection with visual arts and museums. Users who have a relationship with the sector (studying, teaching, or professional) tend to have a higher knowledge of art, and their content needs are more precise as they are likely to be searching for homework resources, teachers’ packs to prepare a class or a visit, or in-depth articles about specific subjects. In contrast, those users with no connection with visual arts or museums are more likely to have little or no knowledge of art. As a result, their expectations are lower, and they have a less structured agenda than other users researching, so layered content and packaged experiences help them to navigate through the site. In the development of the segmentation, vocational connection ended up being the key variable that divided the users who came with an intellectual motivation to learn and increase their knowledge of art.
Whether the user is a frequent visitor to the website or knows the galleries well has an impact on their experience navigating and browsing the site to find what they are looking for. Regular users know the website and learn how to navigate through it. However, the challenge is to take them on unexpected journeys and show them new content or functionalities added to the website. The majority of Tate users are regulars, with 70 percent of all visits to the website made by a small proportion of regulars. These users tend to be arts professionals, students, or teachers. First timers represent 20 percent of all visits and approximately half the users. These users are likely to be from outside the United Kingdom or are less likely to be art specialists.
The context of the website visit determines a series of specific needs. One of the objectives of the research was to understand the role that the website plays in the visitor’s journey before, during, and after the gallery visit. Roughly half of the visits to the website are related to a gallery visit. Our visitors use the website as a planning tool to see what’s on, research general visiting information—opening times, location, or gallery facilities—and check which artworks and artists are on display. When they are in the galleries, increasing numbers of visitors are connecting to Wi-Fi and using their mobile phones to access the website to learn more about the art they are seeing or to check what’s on. After the visit, people return to the website to look up images, remind themselves about the artworks they have seen, or find more information on artworks and artists. The website is used in this scenario as a way to extend and enrich their gallery visits. There are notable opportunities in providing a more linear and cohesive experience using technology that can enhance the visitor journey in these three phases: during the planning, the physical visit, and after the visit.
In order to identify desirable changes to the website that followed from the audience needs outlined in the newly created segmentation, we also held a workshop in the Digital Department in which we analysed the different visit modes. We first described the ideal experience for each type of visit and then started a discussion to address these questions:
Are we serving these users well?
How can we improve the website to meet their needs and deepen engagement?
What are the key digital initiatives in our plan?
What are the challenges and opportunities?
This brainstorming activity helped us to develop a clear strategy for each segment, establishing how we can provide the best possible experience to the visitors and also take them through surprising journeys that can potentially increase their engagement with Tate. As resources are limited, implementing all these ideas would be almost impossible, so we carried out a prioritisation exercise during the workshop to shape our purpose and production activities for the coming year. The exercise consisted of placing each segment in a matrix defined by our strategic priorities and the current user experience. The result gave us a clear and narrow focus on the key areas to work on in order to impact the production planning.
Personal Interest – Turner / Pre-Raphaelites
Student research – homework resources, links from the collection
Leaflet
Presentations
Google Analytic training programme
Monitoring over time
Golden questions
- Déjà vu situation at the Met –
There are some similarities at Tate/Met: website relaunch 2 years ago, art, big museums, websites made of different subdomains and huge volume of traffic: places reporting has been maturing. At Tate we have been for years improving our understanding of audiences and at the Met there is quite a lot of reporting being done in the organisation (email, web, social media, apps)
SURVEY 3 Questions
More internal communication
Involve your colleagues in the research process (eg. fail of the first type of segmentation)
Methodology: Short questions are very useful – do more / Open questions