Wish you were usable! How to improve the quality of a Museum Web site

Usability has recently assumed a much greater importance in the internet economy than it had in the past since a web site is an "open product", accessible by anyone who navigates in the WWW. This means that both in the design phase and after its launch, it is necessary to assess the real quality of the product. Usability has therefore become a fundamental issue, in every phase of the design process, from the beginning to the end. In particular, Museum web sites, whose goal is to communicate robust cultural content to a large number of users, have to pay special attention to their usability, or rather quality. Clearly, this is an arduous task for the designers (and in general for all the stakeholders involved in the development of the application): museum web sites are of growing complexity, address several targets, deal with complex content, have different communication goals: for all this reasons, they need to be well “usable” and efficient. Evaluating the usability of a web application means to try and answer some crucial questions: e.g., How can we avoid users “getting lost” in the site? How is it possible to improve navigation’s effectiveness? What kind of contents shouldn’t be missing? How is it possible to know whether the users have learnt anything from the site? The -ambitious- goal is to establish the degree of user satisfaction with the application and consequently a set of guidelines for improving its quality.