Last week I visited Museums and the Web 2013, the annual conference about digital technology and museums. We were invited to give a talk about the results of our social media monitor, which was developed in the context of the project ‘Museumkompas’. But before I explain more about the presentation, I like to tell a little more about a number of other presentations that I attended.

Last week we had a meeting with two participants of the upcoming MuseumBattle: Paleis Het Loo and the Van Gogh Museum. At the MuseumBattle we offer museums the opportunity to present a problem to ‘our’ students. But before they do that, we play our Media Strategy Game (in Dutch). The game helps organisations, not only museums, to make informed choices about media usage.

The Crossmedialab is part of the Research Centre for Communication and Journalism, one of the six research centres of HU University of Applied Sciences Utrecht. Research at these centres is “aimed at innovation of professional practice”, meaning that science and knowledge is being used in a practical way. (a beautiful associated term is knowledge valorization).

Little did I know that, two years ago, when I started writing my master thesis together with Robbert Winkel, it would end up in a pub in Sweden called “De Klomp”. But that is (obviously) what happened.

Monitoring activities on the web is not new or unique. You have probably heard of Google Analytics (GA), a service that allows to monitor the traffic on a website. Nice graphics and tables show how many people have visited a particular page, where they come from, how long they stay on a page, and so on. This gives a certain impression of the success of a website.

A few times a week I travel through Utrecht CS (Central Station), one of the busiest train stations in the Netherlands. If you have never been there: the main hall is basically a large, rather open space that is often full of people. As a matter of fact I think CS secretly stands for Crowd Surfing. Well, to transfer trains I need to walk from one end from the station to the other end and most of the time at rush hour. But even when it’s very crowded, I can cross the hall without any problems and even without thinking much about all the other people around me. And so does everybody else. When I first thought about this, it looked to me as if the crowd is organized in some way. As if someone or something is constantly coordinating everyone, creating pathways in all kinds of directions. In a way like: “you go a bit to the left and you’re going to walk behind him, you need to slow down a little, etc.”.

The day I started to work at the Crossmedialab I tried to adjust my chair. It is one of those typical office chairs that should be adjustable in every thinkable fashion. I managed to change it in several ways - armrests, seat, back - but I just couldn’t figure out how to adjust the height. A pretty standard and therefore easy accessible option, I would say. Because I am an engineer, I forced myself to understand how it works. So I first turned the chair upside down to see the mechanisms, but they were all covered up. It was only after a few frustrating attempts of pushing and pulling all kind of parts of the chair that I figured out how to change the height of the thing.

To my opinion the chair - or the designer, that is - should give me clear visual hints on how to adjust it. A lever affords pulling, a door with no handle affords pushing, a cup affords pouring fluids into it and so on. Something that is generally known as affordance or to be more precise perceived affordance. Donald Norman describes perceived affordance as: “The appearance of the device could provide the critical clues required for its proper operation” .    

So, I didn’t perceive any good affordance of the way to operate the chair properly. And that frustrated me. Desk chairs are around for many decades. So they should at least have reasonable affordance to be operated properly. Of course this not only goes for desk chairs, but for any technology. But I often see that designers prefer ‘eye-candy’ above the functionality and that can lead to bad affordance. And that, on its turn, can lead to frustration of the user.

Oh, and you can adjust the height of the mentioned desk chair by pulling (!) a small knob that actually affords pushing. It’s placed at the bottom of the right armrest. But to my opinion an explanation about this function shouldn’t be necessary.

_{[1] Norman, D.A., Affordance, Conventions and Design.}