Usability problems on cultural websites. Part 1: finding things
After running usability testing across a wide range of cultural websites, you start to notice that the same problems keep coming up. Different organisations, different platforms, different audiences; often the same issues.
This is the first in a three-part series where we're writing them up. It’s not a checklist of failures. These are problems that can be hard to spot from the inside. It’s intended to be a practical reference for anyone managing or developing a cultural website.
We're starting with findability: the ways visitors struggle to locate what they came for, before they've even had a chance to engage with your content properly.
Contents:
Important information is hidden or unclear
Filters don’t work well enough
The search functionality misses the mark
Information is not linked well throughout the site
1. Important information is hidden or unclear
On many culturalmuseum websites, the information directly related to booking an entry ticket can sometimes be difficult to find. The main components of planning a visit are the opening hours, the price of a ticket, and whether booking ahead is needed.
Many museums have this information on their homepage, making it clear and simple for visitors to spot. However, some have been found to spread those components across several pages and not display some of them.
Another way this is manifesting is by drowning key information in a sea of text, and not using formatting or headings to chunk it out.
Recommendation: Keep things simple and clear, and display key information on the homepage if you can.
2. Filters don’t work well enough
This applies across a site, but the most common place is the What's On page – though filters also turn up in content hubs like blogs, in search, and in other content-heavy sections.
When they work well, filters can be a huge help. The most useful ones let people sort by:
Event type – permanent collection, temporary exhibition, special event, talk, tour, workshop, hands-on
Place – useful for organisations split across several venues, or museums with multiple galleries
Audience – members, young people, schools, families
Price – free versus paid
Date – usually a calendar, sometimes with quick options like "today", "this weekend" or "this month"
Alongside filters, labels carry other important information at a glance, such as “free”, "sold out", "cancelled", and "members only".
The problems we see tend to fall into two camps:
The filters aren’t sufficient or are unclear, leaving visitors to wade through too many results, or
Filters don’t function intuitively: not updating as selections are made, and with no clear messaging when nothing matches.
Recommendation: Help people find what they want by sorting events into clear, concise categories. Date, audience and event type are the essentials – everything else can follow.
3. The search functionality misses the mark
Good search needs results that are clearly organised. For a site-wide search, label or categorise what you're showing – collection objects, blog articles, website pages, press releases.
It also needs to show that a search has happened (a page refresh, a loading indicator, anything that signals something is underway), and how many results there are. Are visitors sorting through 3, 30 or 300?
Typos are another common sticking point. Does search cope with them? Does it offer alternatives, suitable results, or synonyms?
Recommendations: Organise, label, state the obvious, and direct.
4. Information is not linked well throughout the site
This issue shows up in a few different ways. Most often we see:
Calls to action (CTAs) that are unclear or missing
Missed opportunities to link related pages together, whether through a hyperlink or a CTA
Vague link text – "click here" or "read more" – that gives no clue where it leads
Good internal linking helps people move through a site without having to backtrack to the navigation. If you mention another page that expands on a point, link to it. If you want people to do something, give them a clear next step.
It's worth paying attention to the link text itself, too. Descriptive anchor text – "browse our spring exhibitions" rather than "click here" – tells people where a link goes, and the benefits overlap nicely with accessibility and SEO.
Recommendation: link generously and label clearly. Every link should make sense on its own, point somewhere useful, and tell people where it'll take them.
These four issues are all variations on the same underlying problem: when someone can't find what they need quickly, they don't usually dig deeper. They just leave. And because these problems often don't show up clearly in analytics, they can quietly persist for a long time.
In part two, we’ll look at what happens once people do reach the right page, and the ways that language, visual design, navigation structure, and mobile experience can still get in the way.