Helping Europe get in touch with its culture
User Vision, one of Europe’s leading independent user experience companies, has been commissioned by Europeana to work on its search function.
Europeana is the groundbreaking cultural portal set up by the European Commission that enables people to explore the digital resources of museums, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections around Europe. More than 19 million items including paintings, music, films and books are available online. Around 1500 institutions have contributed, including the British Library in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Louvre in Paris.
User Vision’s goal is to work with developers to improve the user experience of the search function and to identify the cultural and language differences for a multi-national audience when looking for cultural content. As part of a Europeana core technology project called ASSETS, which works to improve the usability of the portal, User Vision will make sure that the site’s search function works well for everyone who chooses to use it, no matter their language or background.
Tests will be run in three different countries, to identify any cultural differences and language problems in searching. Additionally, User Vision will test new image, audio and video recognition software to see if this helps users to find what they are looking for. Keyword searches are often tripped up by language differences and misspellings so being able to identify similar data should make search more effective.
“We want to get feedback early in the process so that we develop the most usable services possible. If the search function continually gives you results in a language that you don’t understand, or only part of what you’re looking for, then your experience will be not as positive as it should be,” says Europeana Product Developer David Haskiya. “User Vision clearly understands the challenges of our sector and of working with different cultures and languages, so this will help us create the site our users want.”
“This is an exciting piece of work for us because it’s such a fascinating project, as well as a usability testing challenge. It will be satisfying to compare the user experience of people from different countries and see how we can make the search function work well for everyone who uses it, ” says User Vision Managing Director Chris Rourke.
User testing will begin in mid-September and continue until the end of 2011.
User Vision has previously worked with English Heritage and the National Library of Scotland, so understands the challenges and demands of this complex sector and its wide range of users. User Vision also has experience in working with EU government bodies, having recently worked for EU-OSHA, the European Health and Safety Standards Authority.
.jpg)