| Powerhouse Museum | National Library of Australia | New York Public Library | |
| Interaction | The powerhouse museum uses a Facebook page to interact with their users. This is the peak method for user interaction, as the organisation is able to instantly engage with their users through the comments, and users can directly message the organisation, asking questions and seeking clarification. | National Library of Australia uses multiple social media platforms to connect with their audience, with a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and an Email link provided, as well as a phone number. This allows users to approach interaction with their own preference. The site also provides readily available tabs to find information from the navigation bar, allowing users to quickly find relevant information, an improvement over the Powerhouse Museums pages. | The New York Public Library has the Big 4 of social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube), providing the ability to personally connect with their users. The main feature missing is the lack of a readily available online reference service, with the Get Help tab feeling more like an FAQ then an offer of personal assistance. |
| User Experience | The Powerhouse Museum’s website utilises a more modern approach. An expandable menu reveals all menus and submenus on the screen, allowing users to see the full site map all at once. This can be effective at allowing users to quickly find what they’re looking for without searching through menus. The site appears to have prioritised an aesthetic goal over strict functionality, reflecting it’s role as a cultural entity rather then strictly an information organisation. | The National Library of Australia uses a website layout that follows the usual rules and styles. Each part of the navigation leads to a clear submenu that covers different areas of user engagement. Some parts of the navigation are not immediately obvious, such as Stories, which includes news, upcoming events, podcasts etc. It also has a comprehensive search function. | The New York Public Library feels like a website stuck in time. It lacks the sleek, minimalist feeling of the other two sites, almost an expectation in modern UX. While the site may have felt very natural a decade ago, now it borders on feeling cluttered and hard to scan, with divided sections that stop the eye from quickly gliding across the page. The headings dividing the page are not immediately focused. Instead of a catalogue submenu, it’s called “Books/Music/Movies”, a different approach to most sites of this nature, suggesting a more public facing style of design. The menu’s are more clearly marked in this respect for the average person then the National Library site. |
| Active Functionality | The Powerhouse Museums Facebook and Website both have shopping functionalities. You can get directions through the Facebook page to the museum, linking in with map apps. The Powerhouse website has an extensive virtual archive, with more then 500,000 objects which can all be viewed online. | The National Library site contains a catalogue search, eResources, and an Ask a Librarian area that provides instructions for Online, Phone, In Person and Mail reference services. It also has embedded videos. | The active functionality of New York Public Library focuses more heavily on links to third party services, rather than having inbuilt collection access online, and much functionality appears to be focused on their app rather than their web presence. |
The Powerhouse Museum and National Library of Australia are generally of a high quality and contain all the necessary elements of modern web design. The New York Public Library site lacks many of the common elements of modern web design and is in need of a revision (Garett et al., 2016; Friedman, 2021). Improvements could be achieved by using online tools (Web Accessibility Initiative, 2014) or referring to academic literature to create an internal evaluation system (Vargas et al., 2023).
References
Friedman, V. (2021). 10 Principles of Good Web Design. Smashing Magazine. https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/01/10-principles-of-effective-web-design/
Garett, R., Chiu, J., Zhang, L., & Young, S. D. (2016). A Literature Review: Website Design and User Engagement. Online journal of communication and media technologies, 6(3), 1-14.
Morales-Vargas, A., Pedraza-Jimenez, R., & Codina, L. (2023). Website quality evaluation: a model for developing comprehensive assessment instruments based on key quality factors. Journal of Documentation, 79(7), 95-114. https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2022-0246
National Library of Australia. (2023). Landing Page. https://www.nla.gov.au/
New York Public Library. (2023). Homepage. https://www.nypl.org/
Powerhouse Museum. (2023). Homepage. https://powerhouse.com.au/?fbclid=IwAR3BmVybp2jssxs86zHGDd12tZTI3tnVdt1N0Yw1Cvd8_tuA_aThyy0Q0TY
Web Accessibility Initiative. (2014). Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools List. W3C. https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tools/