As part of a larger museum experience, mobile app content can help “visitors” think in new ways and engage with different perspectives. However, mobile apps should also meet “user” needs for easy and intuitive interaction. In this session from edUi 2013, Centralis' Tanya Treptow and Kathi Kaiser explored key ways for evaluating whether a museum app is meeting the needs of both users and visitors during a day at the museum.
4. A Common Experience…
2013 Annual Museums & Mobile Annual Survey
551 respondents from museums worldwide
66% currently offering mobile or planning to in next 12 months
Top three objectives for introducing a mobile experience:
To make accessible additional interpretive content
As part of institution’s experimentation in engaging visitors
To provide a more interactive experience
Employ
incremental
approaches!
5. What are common tools for feedback in museums?
Focus Groups
Visitor
Observation
Informal
Feedback
Surveys
Analytics
7. Research Strategy
You need to know what you are trying to achieve
before you can determine how to measure it.
1.
What’s the scope of
the experience?
2.
Who’s the
audience?
3.
What are the goals
for success?
11. You need to know what you are trying to achieve
before you can determine how to measure it.
1.
What’s the scope of
the experience?
2.
Who’s the
audience?
3.
What are the goals
for success?
12. What the Visitor Brings
Explorer
Facilitator
• Curiosity driven
• Socially motivated
• Expects to find something
to grab attention and fuel
learning
• Focused on enabling the
experience and learning of
others in their group
Experience Seeker
Professional/Hobbyist
• Perceive museum as an
important destination
• Feels a close tie between
museum and their passions
• Satisfaction from having
‘been there and done that’
• Typically motivated by
specific museum content
Recharger
Pilgrim
• Seeking a contemplative,
restorative experience
• Sense of duty, heritage,
and obligation
• Sees museum as refuge
from work-a-day world
• Visits to honor the memory
of group or memorial
Adapted from: Falk and Dierking, The Museum Experience Revisited, published 2013
13. You need to know what you are trying to achieve
before you can determine how to measure it.
1.
What’s the scope of
the experience?
2.
Who’s the
audience?
3.
What are the goals
for success?
14. What the Museum Brings
Top three objectives for introducing a mobile experience:
To make accessible additional interpretive content
As part of institution’s experimentation in engaging visitors
To provide a more interactive experience
Research has shown that technology that attempts to
be ‘all things to all visitors’ is likely to fail because the
visitors are overwhelmed by choice, much of which is
of little interest to them.
Ben Gammon and Alexandra Burch, ‘Chapter 3: Designing Mobile
Digital Experiences’, Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience
21. “The Experience”
What the
visitor brings
What the
museum brings
Task at
Hand
Physical
Manipulation
The Interaction
Environmental
Factors
Cognitive
Processing
22. Research Questions about The Interaction
Task at Hand
Environmental
Factors
Physical Manipulation
Cognitive Processing
• Can users comfortably hold the device while moving
through the gallery?
• Can they swipe/tap/scroll to find what they need?
23. Research Questions about The Interaction
Task at Hand
Environmental
Factors
Physical Manipulation
Cognitive Processing
• Do users see and understand screen elements?
• Is the language clear, familiar and unambiguous?
24. Research Questions about The Interaction
Task at Hand
Environmental
Factors
Physical Manipulation
Cognitive Processing
• Can users related the screen display to the gallery itself?
• What role do sound & lighting play?
• How does social interaction impact the app’s use, and vice versa?
26. Research Questions about The Interaction
Task at Hand
Environmental
Factors
Physical Manipulation
Cognitive Processing
• Can users accomplish important tasks easily?
27. Iterative Design
Focus Groups
Observation
Informal Feedback
Surveys
Iterative Usability Testing
Analytics
From Dana Mitroff Silvers, Design Thinking for Museums, designthinkingformuseums.net
Informal Feedback
29. Use small samples to diagnose issues, not measure them.
Nielsen, Jakob, and Landauer, Thomas K.: "A mathematical model of the finding of usability problems,"Proceedings of ACM
INTERCHI'93 Conference (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 24-29 April 1993), pp. 206-213.
30. Test early and often with low-fidelity prototypes.
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31. Create tasks that test your hypotheses.
• Do users know what a “collection” is?
— What’s the best way to see the
museum’s pieces from the Renaissance?
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• Can they find a specific object?
— How would you find the famous Seurat
painting?
• Is the term “Facilities” clear?
— Where could you have lunch?
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36. “The Experience”
What the
visitor brings
What the
museum brings
Task at
Hand
Physical
Manipulation
The Interaction
Environmental
Factors
Cognitive
Processing
37. Key Takeaways
• Museums are becoming interactive – this
phenomenon is here to stay
• Current research methods only tell part of the story
• Usability testing can bridge the gap by evaluating the
in-the-moment experience
• Improving the user experience of museum apps will
provide a better overall visitor experience