User testing the Digital Memory Database

Over the past five months, the Landecker Digital Memory Lab research team have been user testing our flagship resource – the Digital Memory Database – containing a collection of global digital Holocaust memory practice.

By Dr. Kate Marrison and Dr. Ben Pelling

In April 2025, the Digital Collective Memory Platform provided the perfect space for us to kick off a series of user testing sessions designed to test and gather feedback on the living-database archive. Joining online, trusted colleagues and friends working in the field of digital memory were the first to be introduced to the wire-framed version of the database in its alpha state.

Listening to their feedback, we further developed the site (as discussed below) and our inaugural Connective Holocaust Commemoration Expo marked the official beta-launch where we showcased the database to a wide range of academics, educators, filmmakers, digital creatives and heritage professionals from more than 30 countries across the Middle East, Latin America, North America, Europe and Asia. This was immediately followed by a workshop at the biennial Max and Hilde Kochmann Summer School for PhD students in Modern European-Jewish History and Culture hosted by the Sussex Weidenfeld Institute of Jewish Studies in cooperation with the Centre for Jewish Studies, University of Graz and the European Association of Israel Studies (EAIS).

Next came the British and Irish Association for Holocaust Studies “Contexts of the Holocaust” annual conference held at the University of Kent where we hosted another workshop with experts in Holocaust history, memory and education. More testing followed in July with memory scholars and creative practitioners at the Memory Studies Association’s “Beyond Crises: Resilience and (In)Stability” annual conference hosted by Charles University and the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. Read more on our reflections of the event.

“This is a gift to us all” – Alpha testing session feedback from a participant working in Holocaust heritage and education.

User testing design

To engage with an iterative development process, we ran multiple sessions throughout the year. These sessions were designed with both qualitative and quantitative methods in mind. Divided into two parts, workshop participants were given an example user case study to prompt their activity, encouraging them to start in different places upon entering the site. Some were given the personas of a researcher gathering examples of digital practice, others took on the role of heritage professionals looking for examples of site-based augmented reality applications. Whereas another group of testers started with a collection of assets containing both digital walkthroughs of projects and interviews with those who created them.

Colleagues were then given 50 minutes to freely explore the site before coming together for a focus group discussion.

The discussion centred on the following points:

• Usability and interactivity
• Functionality
• Searchability

How we responded to the feedback from these sessions is discussed below.

Alongside and in support of the qualitative user testing, we also carried out some automated tracking of how our test users interacted with the database. This consisted of heatmaps and recording sample user journeys. All tracking was aggregated and anonymised to preserve user confidentiality.

Having reviewed a range of applications and code bases, ContentSquare was selected as the most suitable tool. Once a testing session was complete, the ContentSquare dashboard provided us with a range of aggregated visualisations. The two most significant for us were:

• The ‘Scroll’ heatmap: This shows how far users have scrolled down a given webpage and so provides an insight as to which areas of the page are most likely to be viewed. As is common with many websites, the top section of the page was the most likely to be viewed by the users.
• The ‘Clicks’ heatmap: This shows an aggregated ‘map’ of the areas on the page that were most clicked on. This in turn allows us to see which were the most used buttons and links and also which may have gone unnoticed by the users.