Announcement from Find Art Directives Users Group

Via LinkedIn’s Find Art Directives Users Group:

Greetings members. I have run a new set of statistics on the www.findartdirectives.com web database:

746 ————-> Number of users.
714 (96%) –> Number of users with AT training.
75 ————-> Number of Public Directives (directives that you
have created and shared with others)
15 (2%) ——> Number of users contributing Public Directives.

Sadly,a mere 2% — 15 out of 746 people have contributed directives to the database. I am truly disappointed in this! The database has been up for almost 2 years, and so many people are obviously interested in it, considering how many have signed up. But it appears that everyone is just looking and not contributing.

The database CANNOT grow by itself! I maintain this database for free on my own time. I approve users and review directives and add directives. I maintain this group as well. I have personally added 32 directives. That is nearly half the total directives!

Bottom line: IF there is not a significant increase in contributions to the directives in the database, I will shut down the www.findartdirectives.com site and this discussion group.

IF USERS (that means you!) DO NOT ADD AT LEAST 100 NEW DIRECTIVES TO www.findartdirectives.com BY AUGUST 2012, I will close the site.

I consider it impractical to supply a resource that is not being used!

Posted By Carol McCullough-Dieter

Have you been on the Find Art Directives website? It’s pretty much unusable. Is that why only 2% of 746 people have added to the list? My guess is yes. If the goal of your website is to encourage people to add information or look up information, but it’s hard to do so, then you can’t expect people to interact with your website in the way you want them to. This is not the pre-CSS, UI/UX internet. Even if you’re an excellent programmer, you cannot code your website without paying attention to it’s design and the way people interact with your product.

To the tech-savvy art therapy community – please! Let’s up our game, even if it’s a volunteer project…think of it as building out your portfolio/resume. If you’re willing to put in X amount of time into building something useful for our community, spend the extra hours working on the user experience. It’s a shame to have to close down a webpage simply because this feature was overlooked.

One Reply to “Announcement from Find Art Directives Users Group”

  1. Hi All,
    I applaud any effort to get the AT community to collaborate more. It is one of the reasons I launched the “My Art To Inspire Network”, or MyATI.net

    MyATI.net is easy to use, contribute, and search. It’s fully integrated with social networks including Facebook and LinkedIn, and has a simple search engine powered by Google.

    MyATI is a vibrant community of over 500 users comprised of art therapists, educators, students, and more.

    I would welcome any input and feedback that you might have to make the site better and more productive. Check us out at:

    http://myati.net

    Sincerely,
    Cori D
    Founder of My Art to Inspire

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