The Met Museum which has a global reputation for their fine art collection in the united states reached out to the center for digital experiences in order to improve UX on the perspectives section of the website. The Met usually has high traffic on their website which helps audiences like art history students gain crucial information. However, it was observed that the perspectives section of the met website had comparatively lower engagement than their other pages. The Met was interested in learning the interactions and user journeys users go through in the perspectives section to improve the usability of the perspectives section.

Eye- tracking studies were conducted in the Pratt Manhattan Campus to provide visual data with solid proofs explaining how their visitors browse the content with different media types and interact with it. We synthesized this data further with the help of google analytics and noticed some similarities.

After triangulating all the data from our eye-tracking studies and google analytics, our team constructed recommendations that we hope will help The Met in their redesign decisions.

Eye-tracking is a research methodology conducted with the help of a tool called as Tobii pro which detects the eye-movement of the user on the screen. It gives us the data of where user is looking on the screen and generates heat maps of the entire screen.

We recruited 8 participants who are interested in art history who doesn't necessarily have any expertise in art with the help of research ops team.

To analyze the user journey and eye-movement of the user on the navigation bar of The Met website's homepage while searching for the Perspectives Page

To observe how the user interact with the media content on the perspectives page 

We called the participants in person at the Usability lab in Pratt Manhattan Campus to conduct the eye-tracking study.

We asked them to perform 4 tasks on The Met's website and recorded their eye-movement with the help of Tobii pro.

After performing tasks, we asked showed them their recording and asked them to think out loud.

We asked them some post-task questions to understand their journey. 

When users were presented with the task to find the Perspectives page by browsing on the homepage, their first instinct was to raffle through the navigation bar looking for the name 'Perspectives'.

In the above image, it was observed that, when the participant couldn't find the perspectives page through the navigation menu, they directly tried to use the search functionality.

The above image shows the aggregated heatmap generated of all our participants which is showing strong activity in the navigation menu during our first task.

As shown in the above mockup, we thought it would be best to include the name 'Perspectives' in the navigation menu for it to be noticeable. To give more context to users, we added the adjective 'expert', such that the users would know that the page contains learning sources from experts.

Option 2

Implementing the name ‘Perspectives’ in the navigation bar without deviating from it’s original name ‘articles, videos and podcasts’ increases the chance of the user noticing the Perspectives page and helps in its branding.

Keeping the words ‘articles, videos and podcasts’ in the navigation bar, gives the user an idea on what type of media is used to deliver these perspectives.

We asked our user's about their overall perception of the perspectives page. Some of the notable quotes are given below.

Most of the users were confused about the different types of content available on the perspectives page and couldn't understand the purpose of the page.

Putting description below the main heading, stating the content of the page would give user an idea of what content they can expect from this page.

The perspectives page contains articles with various media types like videos and podcasts. Only after opening the article and clicking into the media type, they were able to recognize through what media they access the information.

We noticed in our eye-tracking sessions that the 'close look' feature icon on the main perspectives page and the tooltip present on the article page assisted the users in completing the task.

After observing the heatmap of the perspectives page, it also came to our attention that users were drawn the sub-headings on the perspectives page while completing the tasks as if they were seeking for direction on what they should do next.

Relabeling the sub-headers in accordance to their media type will ease out the user journey as they can directly seek out the media content as per their wants

Only some articles on the main perspectives page had an icon in their thumbnail of their media type, to make the results consistent, we recommend attaching icons to each article thumbnail.

To give clearer context to the users, we recommend putting an explanatory tooltip when the user hovers over the icon.

After delivering the presentation to the design team at the met, a discussion followed about why certain tasks were framed the way they are. They were interested in knowing the inspiration behind the decisions we made as a team to set up the test the way we did. The discussion ended with them acknowledging our team's efforts as our thoughts and struggles with the perspectives section resonated with their internal team as well.

At first the eye-tracking studies seemed intense and the technical issues were not helping either. But as we got the hang of it , the process became fun. The data we gathered from eye-tracking provides us with visual proofs along with the user quotes which establishes our strong findings.

We appreciate the fact that we were able to work with such renowned museum and hope that our study helped them understand the usability issues on the perspectives section of the website.