Channels

Design for User Engagement on Europeana Channels

Master of Science Graduation Project | Client: Europeana | Feb. 2014 - Jul. 2014

Channels project was initiated by Europeana in order to reach more users and engage more deeply with existing users. It is primarily a web platform built on top of Europeana repository and user-generated content. The platform is thematically segmented to match people's different interests on cultural heirtage, and encourages the discovery, reuse and contribution of heritage information. Europeana’s network partners would also be motivated to feature more good content and get in touch with users.

The initial assignment is: to design a concept for Europeana Channels, which should engage users with various content genres in a participatory, meaningful and enjoyable way.

Analysis

3 key research questions “Who could be the target users of Channels? Why would the users interact with Channels? How would the users interact with Channels” were proposed. Due to the openness of the project, the user research was performed both on physical and virtual exhibition visitors in order to look at various perspectives and possibilities.

The user research helps in understanding what would attract target users and in which way to engage them in a long term. Yet it is not enough to answer how would Channels platform be like. Research on current development of cultural heritage websites and the trend of online platform will help Channels to locate its position in the industry of digital cultural heritage.

Design Brief

Platform Vision

Core value: Aliveness: Cultural heritage should be like leaves on an ancient tree rather than leaf specimens. It should be welcoming, inviting people to interact with it, even trimming it; It should energize people with fresh oxygen; it gathers people under the shade; it is growing all the time, with people’s fertilization.
The Strategy: Focusing on enhancing the content by user participation.
Target Group: Culture vultures: cultural enthusiasts and professionals. Mainly in the age range of 25-54, well educated, active on social media platforms.

Design Goal: To develop and sustain users’ engagement with Channels by empowering their

personal growth and meaningful social interaction on the platform.

Design focus: user contribution, especially the collection experience.

Design

The design phase started with the design iteration on the structure of the platform. Afterwards, the design iteration on user contribution was carried out, with some self-exploration and creative session. A cluster of ideas were generated, organized and selected thorugh an expert evaluation. Some ideas were filtered for further improving, which built the basis of two complementary candidate concepts.

Concept

A general structure and layout design for the whole platform was proposed, including 3 main sub-concepts were proposed to enhance the user collection experience on Channels:

Collaborate on collection: Inviting specific users to make a collection together; Contributing items to an "Open Collection" to get wider input from users. Knowledge exchange and collaborative storytelling could be realized in collaborated collection.
Annotation: Posting notes, comments or questions around the items, and specifying it by marking in the items. Design explorations were made to pursue for intuitive and fun way of annotating. Users could also exporting their collections with the annotations.
Statistics: All the collected items in the personal page can be displayed in normal view, timeline view, or location view. The timeline chart and map give an overview of the distribution of the items in different time periods or locations. User can learn more about the items and themselves from the statistics, which could also encourage them to explore further on the platform.

Check the link for the prototype of the concept: http://channelsbusinesscatalystcom.businesscatalyst.com/

Evaluation & Recommendation

The design was evaluated with selected target users. The results showed that the concept was quite promising in enhancing the enduring user engagement, and that the qualities of interaction vision were assessed positively. However, the success of an online platform is attributed to many factors(content quality, valuable user contribution, etc.), and users would need time to explore and experience the platform, seeing what they can gain really. Thus, further recommendations on the concept refinement and the future development of Channels were offered in the end. Below shows an option of refining the sub-concept of "annotation".

Further Work

Channels is a several years' project, and my graduation project was aimed to provided fresh prespectives and insights for Europeana. In the last days during my internship, I participated in the cooperation with User Intelligence (a user experience consultancy in the Netherlands) to carry out more research work on Channels.

If you are interested, please check the final report of the project.

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