Information about Six Museums Located in WA
The western Australian Museum website is the official page for six sites which are located around the Western Australia. This website has all most every information associated with the six museums including the location, history and ticket booking. The mission of this website is to enthuse publics to share and explore their environment, identity and contribute and experience to the diversity and creativity of the museums. The western Australian Museum website not only just showcase the museum utilities and exhibitions information. It also provide other relevant information about the reconciliation action plan, research department, museum excursions and online education. All the museums are undertaken by the WA government as well as the https://museum.wa.gov.au/. This website is pretty neat and responsive and also provide a lot of information like up-coming events and openings. The main purpose of the website is to offer a delicate experience for the vibrant and excellent museum service which is used and valued by all Western Australians and appreciated and visited by the world. They also provide some optimal value to the peoples which they categorized as accountable, inspirational, enterprise and sustainable. They believe, the website provide benefits to all people of Western Australia and identified that they are accountable to them and are custodians of their collection. The Western Australian Museum is a constitutional authority within the Department of Local Government. Under the section 36 of the museum act, the directors have recognized the following branches of the Western Australian Museum.
- Museum of Geraldton.
- Museum of the Goldfields.
- Museum of the great Southern.
- Western Australia Museum-Perth.
- WA Shipwrecks museum.
- WA Maritime museum.
The Interface of the website is pretty impressive and well-designed. The menu bar consist of relevant hyperlinks such as Home, What’s new, visit and many more. Every section also has their sub section with appropriate contents. The whole interface is simple and responsive to the window resolution. The contents are organized in particular section and match with graphics as well. The head part of the website is optimized with the WAW and Government of Australia logo including the menu bar and search section. The WAM logo looks pretty astonishing along with the navigation bar. The search box also located on the right of the logo and connect, accessibility and site map section above it. The overall color combination is pretty eye-catching and effective as a standard a website. The color combination of black, pitch black and white looks impressive along with logos.
Body: In the body part, the carousel is well designed. Most of the websites today comes with one or more carousel nowadays. The carousel design is pretty standard and showcase most of the upcoming events information and news. They provides navigation buttons to check out next banners. However, the auto slider utility is not available which is inconvenient compare to other standard websites (Card 2015). Other body parts are also designed standardly with proper heading and sub heading. They also added relevant image and video as necessary. This website also have subscription options at below where user can log in through email, twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. The Footer is as usual consist of the copy right details (Booth 2014). This section also provide some easy access bar including home, privacy and log in options.
Mission to Inspire Publics and Enhance Experiences
https://museum.wa.gov.au/ provides many optimal features to all people of Western Australia. This website act as a medium between the peoples of WA and the museums. It provides most of the necessary information of the six popular museums which are situated in Western Australia. Information including events details, location and other collection are easily accessible in the website. The website does not only provide relevant information about the museums and upcoming events, interested people also can buy tickets of upcoming events directly from the website. Although, e-commerce has been a common aspects nowadays. The B2C implementation in the website plays a huge role in terms of effortless transaction and availability check (Baecker 2014). The payment method is pretty good as they are several option for different pay scale. For instance, adults and Childs the fees differ as 15 and 12.50 dollar. Interested people can easily book the tickets and pay to register. The ticket booking system is pretty much convenient and moderate. The website provide a simple solution for multiple ticket booking process. According to the unit number of each categories, the system generate the total payment slip. Users can pay directly through debit and credit card which is very convenient (Waddell, Zhang and Sundar 2015). Through the website, interested people can book the tickets a weak before the exhibition date.
The website also provide the locations of all the museums including the events time and date. It provides almost every up to date information associate with museum activity. Under the explore section in the menu, online exhibitions features offers amazing experience for the visitors as they can explore the research activities and filed work and research in new and engaging ways(Preece, Rogers and Sharp 2015). The website can be considered as an effective online exhibitions site as week. It provides an eye-catching design with full of relevant content as history of sights, debt of honor exhibition panels, beneath the waves and dirk hartog. There are also other features available in the website. The key features are listed below:
- Panorama view of all the museum
- Online Ticket Booking System
- WA Museum Shop
- Online Exhibitions
There are several positive aspects which can be recognized in the website. Firstly, the design can be considered as a positive aspect as it is pretty convenient and color combinations suits with each other as well.
Usability: The contents are also managed in an effective manner. The interaction between head, body and footer is moderate. The overall usability is also very decent in terms of accessibility. For booking any ticket the overall process is pretty simple as well. The website also provide panorama views of all museums. To check the panorama views of any museum the following steps are necessary.
- Click on “visit”from Menu bar > click on any museum name, for instance “New Museum Perth” > click on “start your virtual Tour”.
Responsive: Responsive web design is a method to web design that sorts web pages render well on a different devices and screen sizes or window (Lazar, Feng and Hochheiser 2017). The website is fully responsive as every section of the website is compatible with different aspect ratio. The website changes its view according to the screen ratio of several devices such as mobile phone, tablet and pcs (Helander 2014).
Figure 1: website view on desktop
Relevant Information about Reconciliation Action Plan and Research Department
Source: (Exhibition et al., 2018)
Figure 2: Website view on phone
Source: (Exhibition et al., 2018)
The website also have some minor flaws in design which are discussed below:
Padding: even though, the website have a decent design. There are some basic flaws under many division. The padding-top and padding-bottom of many section is too wide. The padding design could be a little optimized in order to save some valuable space.
Figure 3: wide Padding
Source: (Exhibition et al., 2018)
Carousel design: the carousal design is pretty standard and also have navigation button to switch the banners. However, the auto sliding facility is not implemented in the website which can be considered as a flaw.
Figure 4: Carousal Design
Source: (Exhibition et al., 2018)
Page loading: The loading time of the website is pretty slow. The website is full of essential contents and there are different type of contents as well. Many of the pages consist of several high-resolution images and videos. The images and videos make the website look better. However, this contents are also reason behind slow loading speed. The high resolution images and videos are not well compressed.
Figure 5: Speed Test Result
Source: (Exhibition et al., 2018)
To evaluate the usability of the website, two user were asked to review the website and their feedback has been collected in order to understand the website usability rate. This part of the report offers two different personas who is accountable for assessing the website. This two dissimilar persons are obtainable as hypothetical users of the interactive system. Two user is chosen for their field knowledge in the course.
Person 1:
Person one is currently pursuing masters in the technical field and he is 25 years old. He was chosen for his interest in website design. He is also a good website designer and very appropriate to review the website. He is familiar with many web designing applications along with the Abode, WordPress and management tools.
Feedback: according to him, the website can be considered as a standard government site includes basic e-commerce and information functionalities. The graphic designs and other functions are also moderate. Although, he finds some flaws in the design and usability which are also identified by me as well. Additionally, he does not like the design of the Manu bar and museum’s pages. Every pages have different design which makes him dislike the website design.
Person 2:
Person 2 is an electronic good supplier and she is currently 30 years old. However her skills over this field is very low as she is only familiar with MS-office, social networking sites and browsers like Google and Mozilla
Feedback: person 2 did not provide any specific area of liking and disliking. When she was asked to book a ticket for an event, it took a while to complete the registration as she was unable to find any booking section from menu. This can be a major issue in terms of usability. However, she finds it attractive and sophisticated like other standard website.
The overall design and functionality of the website is sophisticated. There are also not much of flaws identified in the current design. However, there are some minor flaws which could be altered in order to enhance the functionality and usability. Flaws such as wide padding, miss-lining can be corrected easily with very less effort. The website also consist of hundreds of different contents and functionality. Functions like ticket booking and panorama can be highlighted in the sub menu bar. It also recommended to optimize the overall design in order to enhance the functionality and user experience on the website.
Conclusion
The western Australian Museum website not only just showcase the museum utilities and exhibitions information. It also provide other relevant information about the reconciliation action plan, research department, museum excursions and online education. After analyzing every pages of the website certain minor flaws are identified as well. This website is pretty neat and responsive and also provide a lot of information like up-coming events and openings details of new museum. It can be concluded that the overall website is a standard one and also can be improved as well.
Reference
Baecker, R.M. ed., 2014. Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: toward the year 2000. Elsevier.
Booth, P., 2014. An Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction (Psychology Revivals). Psychology Press.
Card, S.K., 2017. The psychology of human-computer interaction. CRC Press.
Exhibition, H., Museum, W., Discoverers, T., Zone, D., City, M., Competition, J., Exhibition, 2., Geraldton, M., Australia, F., Museum, W., Preview, F., Museum, W., Arctic, A. and Museum, W. (2018). Western Australian Museum | Western Australian Museum. [online] Western Australian Museum. Available at: https://museum.wa.gov.au/ [Accessed 2 Aug. 2018].
Helander, M.G. ed., 2014. Handbook of human-computer interaction. Elsevier.
Lazar, J., Feng, J.H. and Hochheiser, H., 2017. Research methods in human-computer interaction. Morgan Kaufmann.
Preece, J., Rogers, Y. and Sharp, H., 2015. Interaction design: beyond human-computer interaction. John Wiley & Sons.
Waddell, T.F., Zhang, B. and Sundar, S.S., 2015. Human–Computer Interaction. The International Encyclopedia of Interpersonal Communication, pp.1-9.