at mcn in chicago: new spaces, new measures. measuring success

Sheila Carey chairs a session on evauation in web spaces.

Beth Kanter {see http://beth.typepad.com/beths_blog/] on evaluating social media talks about moving beyond measuring static use of web sites to get at ways of appreciating the impact of social media.She cites Scoble: audience, engagement, loyalty, influence, and action for some principles that help understand the impact of a site in a social media context. Overally, she notes that trends are more important than actual numbers, as many of these measures (such as ) are hard to quantify. See socialmediametrics.wikispaces.com for a link to her slides.

Tim Hart introduces analytics as used at the Getty Trust, and the challenges of adapting measures that are e-commerce focused to mission-driven organizations. As an example, he looks at a page from the Getty Museum Site. The click map shows that people are going to the things that the page highlight; netgenesis stats show more detail, that lets you compare clicks to actual usage?. it makes it clear that many people link deep into the site, and that section pages aren't necessarily seen. but bot and spider traffic are a significant number of page views and need to be removed (javascript based tools can help filter those out). trends are more important than actual numbers. Metrics need to be compared to other measures, including interviews, visits ...

Tim Svenonius of SFMoMA talks about evaluation of Making Sense of Modern Art. First launched without monitoring, they re-designed to allow monitoring with web-trends. there was a strong 70-80% drop-off per click. For a site where the "meat'' was 4 clicks deep, this seemed a bit problematic. but it doesn't take into account deep-linking through search engines, and they were able to encourage that kind of traffic by creating a series of 'index' pages for the flash resources. looking at click paths on the work pages showed a bias for the top right, and also showed that users only looked at 1 or 2 of the available 6 or 7 features. The circular navigation reduced this bias. authoring strategies were also challenged when the paths into works were not controllable. links in are critical, as they are evidence of your impact.

DB: what does it mean to re-think in a non-linear environment, when we've been thinking about pedagogically based narrative in a very different way? Responses: make pages have an identity in the site.

Beth: need to enable re-use of each bit of content, enable comment, linking, personal-meaning making. OpenSocial protocol may enable this.

Tim S.: enabling engaging content to be out there is important, so they are surfacing artists' videos (highly rated by visitors)

Tim H.:  cross-type evaluation in design and in evaluation of web sites and on-siste experience (scantron as a tool for on-site data capture).