Which special digital features are most appreciated by catalogue users?
An obvious advantage of digital catalogues over their print counterparts is the variety of technological tools that can be built into the interface that allow users to interact beyond just reading text and looking at static images. These digital catalogues have a range of features designed to enrich the user experience, including but not limited to: special citation generators, zoomable images, sculptures that can be rotated 360°, audio/video content, and side-by-side image comparison tools. Each of these special features takes considerable time and energy to create, so the team asked, “Do users find these tools helpful? Are they worth the investment?”
Tool Findability
The utility of the catalogues’ special tools depends first on users’ ability to find these tools. To understand whether or not users are likely to encounter the catalogues’ special features in a brief session, the email survey asked participants to spend three minutes in free exploration of their assigned catalogue. After their three minutes had elapsed, they were asked check off a list of the special features they had encountered. In three minutes of use, most of the special features listed had been discovered by less than half of the participants.
| Feature | Catalogue | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AIC n=73 |
Getty n=75 |
NGA n=76 |
PMA n=84 |
TOTAL n=288 |
||
| high-resolution zoomable images | 67% | 69% | 61% | 58% | 68% | |
| citation tool | 40% | 37% | 24% | 37% | 37% | |
| PDF downloads/print-friendly versions | 22% | 23% | 37% | 36% | 32% | |
| 360° rotating images | 8% | |||||
| interactive layered images | 14% | |||||
| tutorials | 7% | |||||
| glossary | 59% | |||||
| login/note function | 18% | |||||
| glossary and image pop-ups | 48% | |||||
| interactive maps | 84% | |||||
| object scale diagrams | 45% | |||||
| side-by-side comparative image viewer | 16% | 12% | 14% | |||
| reader mode (side-by-side columns) | 21% | |||||
| downloadable images | 51% | |||||
| audio/video content | 49% | |||||
| digitized archival materials | 64% | |||||
| share function | 14% | |||||
| timeline | 31% | |||||
| Feature | Catalogue | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AIC n=73 |
Getty n=75 |
NGA n=76 |
PMA n=84 |
TOTAL n=288 |
||
| high-resolution zoomable images | 67% | 69% | 61% | 58% | 68% | |
| citation tool | 40% | 37% | 24% | 37% | 37% | |
| PDF downloads/print-friendly versions | 22% | 23% | 37% | 36% | 32% | |
| 360° rotating images | 8% | |||||
| interactive layered images | 14% | |||||
| tutorials | 7% | |||||
| glossary | 59% | |||||
| login/note function | 18% | |||||
| glossary and image pop-ups | 48% | |||||
| interactive maps | 84% | |||||
| object scale diagrams | 45% | |||||
| side-by-side comparative image viewer | 16% | 12% | 14% | |||
| reader mode (side-by-side columns) | 21% | |||||
| downloadable images | 51% | |||||
| audio/video content | 49% | |||||
| digitized archival materials | 64% | |||||
| share function | 14% | |||||
| timeline | 31% | |||||
The findability of these special features is largely dependent on the unique design of each catalogue. The map feature of the Getty Roman Mosaics catalogue is especially prominent on the catalogue’s homepage, so it’s unsurprising that it received a high percentage of usage. The side-by-side image comparison viewers featured in the NGA and PMA catalogues, in contrast, require some digging to find. Across all catalogues, however, most participants did hone in on the zoomable images, which further reinforces our finding that images are of utmost important to the target audience.
Email survey participants might have found the catalogues’ special features through their free exploration, but they were also directed later in the survey to search specifically for image-viewing tools, citation tools, and pdf downloads/print-friendly versions of the catalogues—three features common across the four catalogues. They then rated the difficulty of finding and using these tools. Once participants knew a tool existed, they generally didn’t find it hard to locate. Participants in the focus groups, however, consistently said that if they had not been specifically directed to many of the tools in their homework exercise, they would not have found them in their own browsing. The challenge for the catalogues, therefore, is raising user awareness of these special features.
The PMA’s Johnson catalogue and the NGA’s Dutch Paintings catalogue also tended to receive higher scores than the others on the findability and usability of their digital tools. Both catalogues group their tools together for easy access, which may be a reason for their appeal. (See Appendix A: Further Analyses — Tool Findability for a further breakdown of differences in the catalogues’ tools.)
Tool Utility
The catalogues’ special features—such as citation tools, zoomable images, and pdf downloads—tended to be received favorably by our study participants. When asked to give an overall rating of the catalogues’ digital tools at the end of the survey, participants gave positive responses toward the “excellent” end of the scale.
Within each catalogue, however, certain tools were rated more useful than others. The highest-ranking tools are shown below. The digitized archival material featured in the PMA catalogue was immensely popular with participants, followed by images that could be viewed in high resolution as well as downloaded.
The PMA’s Johnson catalogue is the only one in this study that includes archival materials (over 6,000 items), which are cross-referenced from its artwork entries. The archives were not mentioned frequently during our focus groups, but one participant commented that they loved how the PMA catalogue “broke down the silos” between museum and archives, relieving scholars of the burden of having to search multiple databases.
Of all the digital tools in the catalogues, focus group participants spent the most time discussing the image-viewing features. Being able to view and manipulate images is of utmost importance to the catalogues’ target audience:
I think if you’re talking interactivity, anything that can help the scholar, the researcher understand the object better—I love that.
Participants’ number-one priority in image tools was high-resolution images that could also be downloaded. They were pleased by the quality provided by most of the catalogues, but occasionally annoyed when an image couldn’t be downloaded or when they had to visit a separate page to do so. Minute details are important to the target audience. One participant noted:
If I want to share the way, for example, Matisse painted, I want to be able to see his brush strokes or um, if I want to show how a mosaic is made, I want to see the exact dimensions of the tessera or so on and so forth. So I was missing sometimes a scale bar.
The Getty catalogue does include a scale for its mosaics, which users appreciated. They wished that the other catalogues would also find ways to represent dimensions of their works.
The more complex image-viewing tools, such as the 360° views of sculptures and the layered images in the Matisse catalogue, were also appreciated, although by a somewhat smaller audience. A conservator noted that the x-ray and infrared images were immensely helpful for his work and that there is never space for these images in print catalogues.
The NGA and PMA catalogues both incorporate image comparison tools, which were also praised by many users. One focus group participant noted that the ability to compare preparatory drawings side-by-side with a finished work was extremely helpful to her as someone interested in artistic process. Of the two catalogues, the NGA’s tool was more popular because it allowed participants to choose which images they wanted to compare.