At Europeana, the EU's online cultural archive, webmaster Dean Birkett is a jack-of-all-trades. He oversees all changes, working with designers, UI experts and developers and uses Verify to do testing he needs to validate their ideas. He generously agreed to share his experience and advice with us.
What does Europeana do?
Europeana is an internet portal that gives quick and easy access to millions of books, paintings, films, audio files, museum objects and archival records that have been digitized throughout Europe. There are presently 19 million objects that can be found on Europeana, and more to follow!
How do you use Verify, and why do you like it?
Verify has been fantastic for gaging, both internally and externally, what the staff and users like (or don't like) about the upcoming redesign of the portal. We have used the information to decide upon many key things on the redesign, including the main object display page, and the logo placement on the portal.
What feature(s) do you use most?
The A/B test has been the most useful test for us at present. In the tests that we have run there were clear winners, and these factored heavily in what route we went with regarding the design and layout of the site. In fact, the winners of these tests were the ones we have opted for.
Do you have a specific story you could share about how Verify has helped you?
Our designer came up with some mockups of the new portal, and the orientation of the logo was an initial concern to a number of us here. By using the A/B test we could clearly see where the usersa'' preference went, and found out that the designer was right all along!
Any tips for other customers?
Cross posting across social media resources definitely increased the amount of responses we received in our tests, and it also provided some great feedback and comments. Also the a''Common wordsa'' filter in the test summary is a really useful guide to see what words keep cropping up. On our logo test, the word a''logoa'', a''bettera'', a''cleanera'', a''spacea'' and a''balancea'' were much more prominent on the design we eventually chose. We found that these were the key indicators that made the design more appealing.
