Revisions are in bold for this page.
Insight into prompts/tasks/questions
We interviewed Ms. Smith, a WCMA curator who specializes in finding art among contemporary living artists. Unfortunately, we had to settle for a regular interview instead of a contextual inquiry. This was primarily because of time limitations as she had a very busy schedule. The day after this CI we performed two others with students who like to visit WCMA.
However, we still gained significant insights from the regular interview. We asked her questions such as: How do you go about choosing a piece of art? Do you have a set of qualities you look for in each piece? Unfortunately, we were not able to come up with any solutions to her problems, so we could not test any of our ideas with her. In regard to her responses, it is important to note that she said audience/visitor emotion is rarely a criterion for choosing a piece of art. Emotion is so subjective and varied that it is too difficult to use as a measure of art quality. However, she did say one of her goals was to find pieces that invoke intriguing ideas and unexpected discussion points. Therefore, if our design is to aid curators, emotion alone may not be the most helpful data for them. We may also consider trying to record how much discussion and debate each artwork creates. Another goal she had was to fill holes in the WCMA artwork collection. If the WCMA collection was particularly weak in regard to a certain artist or time period, then she would try to find pieces that fill this hole. Unfortunately, there is no current solution for this based on our initial design thoughts, but maybe we could come up with a way to help curators in this process. Additionally, she said WCMA occasionally does audience interviews. This is where our design and additions to the WCMA database could possibly expedite the process, giving her the outside feedback she needs without doing extra laborious work. Unfortunately, we only had a very limited time to talk to her so not all of our questions could be answered. I have already made an appointment to meet with another curator tomorrow (10/2), so hopefully we can gain even more insight to help us on our design.
As for the remaining inquiries, we hope that we will be able to adequately complete contextual inquiries instead of normal interviews. However, this interview actually gave us a better understanding of what information curators really need, so we hope to get a similarly better understanding for our other two sets of users. In the case that we need to do normal interviews, we will try to do a better job to plan our questions ahead of time. We will also try to schedule it to make sure we aren’t so limited by time.
