A feature of the Australian Museum website where members of the public can identify a specimen or get in touch with an expert.
The Australian Museum offers an identification service where the public can send in weird and wonderful specimens to be identified by the in-house scientists and researchers. The ‘Common enquiries’ (see below) feature of their website includes some commonly asked questions and an online form to submit photos and some basic information.
The Australian Museum’s enquiry team is overwhelmed with identifications and the wait times for users is unpredictable, with some enquiries never receiving a response.
The website offers a list of commonly asked questions, but this doesn’t seem to be of much help to users who turn to the online form and submit an enquiry anyway. This results in the enquiry list being full of commonly asked identifications.
This design solution aims to:
→ Minimise the amount of common enquiries submitted.
→ Increase the confidence of someone using the feature to self-identify their specimen.
→ Minimise the amount of incorrect identifications.
→Increase the quality of information submitted with an enquiry.
This interactive feature allows the public to self-identify their specimen based on a few easy questions.
Illustrations keep the questions general enough that someone from the public could answer.
If a user completes Quick Classify and can't find a match for their specimen, they are prompted to submit an enquiry.
Moving the link to the enquiry form will reduce the overall number of common enquiries as well as being able to utilise details collected from the Quick Classify questionnaire.
This wireframed concept was a small personal project to explore some problem solving in an existing museum website.
Website design
© 2020 Giselle Stidston
Contact
giselle.stidston@gmail.com
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