The National Air and Space Museum is a popular spot for visitors to the Washington, DC area. "More than eight million people a year visit the Museum's two locations, making it the most visited museum in the country. - Source."
We were asked to design a mobile application to help a visitor or family navigate the exhibitions, find an exhibit that would most interest them, and be able to keep track of the most interesting information, displays, or exhibits that they discover on their trip to the museum.
I worked on user interviews, prototyping, information architecture (via card sorting), usability testing, and persona creation.
We sent out a survey to get a handle on what would be of interest to museum goers. We then visited the National Air and Space Museum to observe the museum layout and flow and to interview patrons and employees.
During the observation phase we noticed that there was a lack of signage for family features like baby changing stations and an absence of multilingual exhibit descriptions. In addition to this, if the museum were crowded patrons would have a difficult time accessing and reading museum placards.
Our interviews revealed that museum volunteers at the information desk occasionally had difficulty communicating with international visitors due to language barriers.
We first looked at the mobile applications of other institutions with a high volume of national and international visitors. The MOMA and Disneyland offered great features to assist patrons in their search for the content of interest. MOMA provides a fantastic content navigation experience within the application. The Disneyland app provides filter functionality to narrow down items within the map.
We created four personas in order to generate scenarios based on those interviewed:
Jennifer, her husband John, her 10-year old son Steve, and 18-month old son Kyle are visiting Washington, DC from Plainfield, NJ. They are only in town for the weekend and want to accomplish as much as possible. They have chosen the NASM as the main focus of their first day. Due to young Kyle, they need to be able to locate and get to bathrooms quickly. They also want to be able to grab a healthy lunch near the museum. For Jennifer’s family, efficient use of time is of the essence.
Luca and his wife are touring Washington, DC from Rome. He has a real interest in history and has his heart set on visiting the NASM while in town. Luca’s wife Chiara is not a history fan and Luca is looking for a way to keep his wife engaged while they are visiting the museum so that they can both have fun. For Luca, fun and engaging experiences are of high importance.
Helen is an area resident and wants to plan a trip to the NASM. She has another engagement in the afternoon and wants to see specific exhibits within a short period of time. She is not a fan of crowds or using a map to navigate, and prefers to take tours when available. There is no tour available on the morning she plans to visit the museum. For Helen, an audio tour would be an ideal replacement for a Docent.
Brad is an area resident and is going to the NASM with his middle school class. As a child Brad dreamed of being an astronaut. He built and launched rockets with his father growing up. As he got older his attention switched to lacrosse and girls. Specifically his crush Erica. He plans to hang out with his boys and has his fingers crossed that they will run into Erica and her friends at the museum. He is not a fan of reading and wants to have a good time.
Helen is visiting the museum but only has 45 minutes before she needs to leave to meet her friends for lunch. The museum tour will be in mid swing when Halen arrives. This comprehensive tour is not ideal because Helen is really interested in Apollo Moon Missions and the tour will not be at this exhibit during her visit. Luckily for Helen there is an audio tour of the Apollo missions available in the NASM mobile app. This will give Helen the opportunity to tour the exhibit at her own pace and make it in time to meet her friends for lunch.
My intention was to provide the ability to access exhibit information in written form in addition to a guided audio tour for people like Helen. To provide an option for people to read about exhibits at their convenience. I also wanted to provide continued learning options and educational games that could be enjoyed in the museum or elsewhere. I began wire framing ideas for audio playback, trivia and a scavenger hunt.
During testing it became clear that the ability to minimize the audio player in order to interact with other parts of the application would be required. I added icons to provide context that audio is available, it is possible to save or favorite an item, and how to locate particular exhibits on the respective screen.
With exhibits consisting of multiple objects I created an example screen that would permit access to each individual object within an exhibit. Here access to audio and location for each object could also be reached.
The next piece was to present exhibit and object details alongside options for audio, favorite/saved items, and location information. Feedback brought me to increase the size of the icons in addition to the space between the icons. This would increase the ability to target each icon more effectively.
For the audio player I started off with a simple banner at the bottom of the page. My intention was to provide the title of the content, a play and pause button, and a progress indicator in a small amount of space. I also wanted to include a signal that the player could be expanded. I did this by including an arrow at the top.
In future iterations I reduced the size of the image, repositioned the icons, and decreased the opacity of the player.
In the last iteration I added a back button, increased the size of and space around the icons to aid in targeting, and increased the weight of the expansion arrow.
For the expanded audio player I had a larger space to work within. I added a progress scrubber with a numerical representation time played and time remaining, options to skip backward by 10 seconds and forward by 45 seconds, and an option to adjust the playback speed.
Next I increased the size of the numerical elements to make them easier to view.
I then decreased the opacity of the player to provide access to the content underneath, repositioned the playback speed icon, added a closed caption option, and added a playlist icon.
Following that I increased the weight of the collapse arrow. I removed the playlist icon after discussions with the rest of the team indicated that we would not need to include this feature in our initial most viable product.
For the trivia I wanted to provide different sets based on level of difficulty to to provide people with the option to work their way up to more difficult questions.
Initially I wanted to include an indication of the number of questions included in each set. This was replaced by audio and location icons in future iterations.
Within the trivia set I included a placeholder for an image alongside the question. I included a form for multiple choice answer selection and a progress indicator.
In future iterations I added a button to continue on to the next question. This was a result of testing and realizing that a person might want to change an answer before moving on to the next question. I also removed the image placeholder in order to provide more space for other content.
For the scavenger hunt we wanted to provide a list of tasks or objects to look for. I added a camera icon that would bring up the camera to enable the ability to take a picture of each completed task upon discovery. A check mark would provide feedback that a task had been completed.
In the next iteration I added a progress indicator which stemmed from an idea we had to make the scavenger competitive. The idea was that groups would be able to compete to complete each scavenger hunt. The indicator would provide a measure of the leader of the groups progress and a stopwatch indicating the time elapsed since the hunt began.
In the last iteration the progress indicator was removed and a temperature icon was added. The idea was that as a person moved around the museum these icons would update to provide feedback as to how close (hot) or far (cold) a person was to a task. This feature would be possible using beacon technology. More information about beacon technology can be found towards the bottom of this project.
Clickable prototype can be found here.
While working on this project we were introduced to beacon technology. Beacons take advantage of device proximity and bluetooth to invoke a prompt on a mobile device. This technology could be leveraged to provide additional functionality to the mobile application.
The first step would be to place beacons at exhibits throughout the museum. Next, when a person with the mobile application enters an area with a beacon present they would be prompted to view content for that exhibit. This technology could also be used to inform museum patrons that there is a mobile application when they enter the museum.
We also wanted to use the beacon technology for the scavenger hunt to provide feedback in the application of how close a person was to the piece they were hunting for and to aid in the process of capturing that the discovery of the item was complete.
More information about this technology can be found here.
During the prototyping phase I introduced the color design language and instructions with interactive portions. I wanted to engage the audience by providing illustrated instructions alongside written ones. The idea being with each task after a person performs the instruction within the application feedback is provided to indicate completion followed by automatic advancement to the next task. I also wanted to provide the flexibility to go at one's own pace. There would be options to skip tasks or entire sections and to go back to previous tasks as well.
We also wanted to include additional tutorials for advanced features that would appear after the basic tutorial when the layers or filters features had been selected. A prompt would present the option to continue learning more if the person were interested. This would only appear one time but could be accessed thereafter by selecting the "?" help section on the left panel.
Clickable prototype can be found here.
In the end education was our main focus. Our research led us in that direction. Our goal was to empower people using the application to reach their goal. Our suggestions were well received and we handed off our research findings to the Create team so that they could be prioritized and addressed.
