Evaluation of art museums' web sites worldwide

Nowadays, it is widely observed a constantly growing number of online museums. At the same time, many studies argued that evaluation is the major tool in the effort of designing informative, effective and qualitative web sites. This paper introduces MUSEF (Museum’s Sites Evaluation Framework), a framework for evaluating museums’ sites from the users’ point of view, and applies it to evaluate 210 art museums’ web sites worldwide. MUSEF is composed from six fundamental evaluation dimensions: Content, Presentation, Usability, Interactivity & Feedback, e-Services, and Technical. Each evaluation dimension contains several important criteria. The evaluation results revealed that most sites needed improvement with respect to Interactivity & Feedback, and E-Services. There were also large variations among the sites with respect to Presentation, Usability, and E-Services. Finally, suggestions for improvements are made.