Uppsala Evolution Museum /
Digitizing the Group
Museum Experience
A mobile application developed to enhance the storytelling and context building of the museum artifacts and to promote engaging social interactions within groups in the museum.
Team
Euodia Louis
Eve Martina Lange
Nouman Maqbool
Yuanxi Jiang
Project Type
Master's project
Supervisor: Paulina Rajkowska
Department of Informatics and Media Uppsala University
⚠️ Disclaimer: In this project, I'll share the entire process of academia HCI product development (thus, this gonna be a loong page). Some stages of the process may seem unrelated to the industrial HCI and that's the learning point!
Let's begin by talking about the research problem construction 🧠
This 7-week project is centered around the general adult group experience in museum in relation to the museum activities. The project is situated in the Paleontology department of the Museum of Evolution in Uppsala, a site that receives a great deal of group visitors.
We found out that the current general public's social experiences in museums can be described as a disconnect between group dynamics and engagement with museum objects. While the public “actively seeks out meaningful experiences, fresh sources of knowledge, and uncommon venues to meet and interact, museums are in a strong position to bridge the gap” (Lumsden, 2019). In this case, we focused on context building, information provision, and engaging group experiences, our point of entry was answering the question: How can we leverage the social experience within groups of people in museums?
Literature Review
This is one of the differences between academic and industry HCI. This stage was crucial to comprehensively understand the research problem. It provides context, informs methodology, avoids duplicative research, and ensures that professional standards are met.
Four areas were determined as being important factors in understanding the problem space and shaped the initial research methods, such as the questions we asked during interviews. Summaries of relevant insights in each research area are as follows:
Theories
Three theories mentioned throughout were used to help frame our thoughts & decisions:
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Activity theory
Leont’ev, describes activities as “subject, object, actions, and operations”, where subject is group/person that has a motivating, specific object(ive) sustained through actions which can become established operations (1974, as cited in Nardi, 1996). Context generation through activities and the “transformative relationship between people and artifacts” are also interesting (Nardi, 1996). -
Social facilitation
Described as the effect mere presence of others has, creating alertness or anticipation in a person which may increase their performance on simple tasks and vice versa on complex tasks (Triplett, 1898, Zajonc, 1965, as cited in Sanders, 1981). -
Conformity
Drawing heavily from Asch (1951), this looks at how group members comply to group pressure in order to be accepted even if they privately disagree (Forsyth, 2010).
Research Prep 📝
This research conducted ethical studies in all procedures. Documentation of data was only collected when participants provided consent. Before preparing the research, we determined our stakeholders. We designed different research questions for each stakeholder categories. Below is the stakeholder map:
In-depth Interviews
We interviewed the Head of Public Department, Elin Stål, and the Museum Host, Henrik. Here are some of the main insights after transcribing:
• According to Henrik’s experience, the overuse of digital interactive systems in museums may have created the impression that it is a playground. This relates to some visitors’ opinion that careful consideration should be given to the implementation of digital systems in order to balance the conventional experience. • Artifact arrangement/placement is mixed as themes and/or expeditions. Henrik mentioned that a chronological arrangement (his preference) isn’t currently supported thus, the aspect of ‘evolution’ is missing. • Families with children are the biggest visitor of the Evolution Museum. • There is a general problem with signage throughout the museum. • The tour guide and details for student groups can be different, Elin said the teachers have different goals. Some teachers use it as an intro to their subject, the others may use it as a part of their curriculum. • Elin has different goals and tour arrangements for people of different ages. For younger people the primary concern would be to make them comfortable, education would be the secondary goal. The tour plan should always be flexible, for the elder, sometimes the guide speed needs to be changed, wait a bit and leave enough time for understanding. For very young kids, the conscious time should be arranged reasonably. • Sometimes it is easier for children to start interacting with strangers because they realize that “oh you're also children”, from this point on, interactions between parents can be formed as well. • The current, text-based information may not always suit groups if they intend to interact as well. A three-level text was described by Henrik. You can only really expect people to read the largest chunk of text, especially if they are in groups. • If a narrative is utilized, Henrik mentioned the importance of deriving it from the material as a unique thing about museums is the presence of artifacts.
Visitor Observations
We used Design Ethnography method. We stayed for around 15 to 20 minutes in each room at the museum, taking notes on people’s behaviors and conversations, sketching interactions with museum objects, and noting down the amount of time they spent in each room. Here are some of the main findings:
• For some group visitors, when they visit and communicate with the others, they usually point to the display case with their finger. But the stone with the sign ”Mig far du ta pa!” in the Dinosaurier room can spark interactive behavior, some parents with their kids would crouched down near this stone and put their hands on it. • Some display cabinets are too high for younger kids, when they visit, the kids often grab their hands around the edges. • Some of the wall labels (object explanations) are written in Swedish, so visitors who are truly interested in the object need to translate everything using Google Translate. • Families are much louder than other groups, but this seems to be accepted. • Most conversations between children and parents were shallow, children would mostly ask what things were. Parents often communicated the facts and information to their children. Parents often needed to get their children excited and to direct their attention. • Groups make many comments about how things look. • Even within groups, there are different ways the members interact with artifacts (e.g. some split off, some continued talking).
Visitor Short Interviews
We conducted 7 short interviews with visitors, four of which were general adult groups, and three were family groups. Some of main findings:
• All families considered the museum as an entertaining place to spend the weekend with their children. While the motivation for adult groups varies, some visited to spend the weekend, and some visited because they were visiting Uppsala for the first time. • Most adult groups felt that the downsides of Evolution Museum lie in the lack of information on artifacts and the context and setting that supports these artifacts. A group of international students used Google Translate to translate the museum's explanations since some of the explanations are in Swedish. • Adult groups stated that going to this kind of evolution museum with friends is more enjoyable since they may enjoy talking about the artifact's history or simply the creatures' looks in the museum. • An audio tour guide is one of the most frequently suggested digital suggestion tools. • Two families discussed museum artifacts with their children for fun and considered the museum a great place to learn, especially when their children get older.
Analyzing the Data
We used the PACT framework and also derived two additional recurring themes. Our coding efforts were helped through affinity diagramming that improved visual organization for our ideation stage.
The Persona
We settled on focusing on the general adult persona. We wanted to make our users feel 'real.' Therefore, we fleshed out some scenarios based on our observation of museum visitors' behavior. We felt this was sufficient for starting our ideation process.
Generating the Idea
Three questions were made based on the data compilation and analysis to help direct our braindumping session. The HWM questions also helped carve out the problem scope of our project:
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How might we support parents/guardians with conveying the texts and information to their children?
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How might we develop engaging social interactions within groups in the museum context?
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How might we enhance the storytelling and context building of the museum objects?
We did braindumping after crafting the HMW questions as our method to generate ideas. This was because we needed time to individually focus on the issues, think deeply and form coherent and diverse ideas, essentially diverging before converging through sharing. From these ideas, we discussed and found some common ideas that we felt were strongest and could serve as a direction. The justification for the ideas were always made in reference to our findings.
The Idea 💡
We essentially digitized the museum's conventional tour. This museum app offers selection of tour with various themes (e.g. The Dinosaurs), which visitors can experience it alone or in a group. The tours contain audio-visual videos where specific museum artifacts are shown and contextualized. Check our 2-mins video about the app concept 👇🏻
Try out the final high-fidelity prototype below 👇🏻
Nah, we didn't dive right into high-fidelity.... There's a bloody hell process behind it. Let's step back to the iteration process ⏮
Wireframing
Wireframing
In order to materialize our idea collaboratively, we decided to work on a whiteboard, sketching and envisioning pages, functions, and layouts. We had repeatedly erased and redrew, iterating and exploring every suggestion we had. This process proved to be very effective and generative, and served as the foundation to our low-fidelity prototype. Two images on the left show our initial idea of the tour workflow. Four images on the right show the supporting features which are collections page and map page. We then proposed the sketched-idea to our supervisor before building the low-fidelity prototype.
Low-Fidelity Prototyping & Testing
We started our first round of testing using the think-aloud method. We tested it within our group before inviting a museum staff member to test it. They provided us with professional information about the museum objects, and upon our request, gave an abbreviated tour of what a normal tour consisted of, which we used to create the tentative app content. We also tested it with our friends and received more feedback about flow and interface.
We concluded from the feedback that the tour flow and the copywriting was not explicit enough for users to understand how our tour feature works. For instance, there was no overview of the estimated duration of the tour, and the users were unaware that the step "Artifact Hunt" required them to locate the artifacts in the museum. Ease of use was a very important consideration because as Social Facilitation suggests, the social environment of a museum would impact task performance; if the task is too complicated, performance is decreased and hence the chance of users getting confused, frustrated, and possibly quitting the app is more likely. Though aesthetically pleasing, the prototype was difficult to test fully as it was missing content and functions, which was exacerbated due to testers remotely testing, so they neither knew the museum, nor were in the right context to test. The testing was incredibly fruitful, nonetheless.
High-Fidelity Prototyping
To improve our UX flow based on the feedback, we developed our tour content and flow to almost resemble a conventional tour flow in a museum. The museum staff assisted us in developing the content by giving a short dinosaur tour, which provided insight into the tour journey and helped us produce video content. We produced a sample tour video concept and did some iterations to the copywriting, design, and UX flow. Here are some of the major changes in this second iteration we made before we finally tested it with real users in the museum:
Alteration 1: According to the Universal Design Principle #4: Perceptible Information, we added a tour overview page to effectively communicate the tour flow to the users, which would help them feel a sense of control, as per Benyon’s 12 principles (2014). Additionally, we added language options to accommodate a more diverse range of language skills, however the translations have yet to be implemented.
Alteration 2: To eliminate redundant steps, we moved the profile creation upfront (when the app is first opened) so that the user does not have to create a profile each time they join a group tour (Universal Design Principle #3).
Alteration 3: We attempted several approaches to convey the user's task in the "Artifact Hunt" stage: finding the artifacts in the museum. Most of which was by making the instruction more straightforward, familiarizing them with the "Artifact Hunt" title, and emphasizing the map even more (Universal Design Principle #4).
User Testing & Last Iteration
We involved museum visitors for the final testing, targeting adult or student groups. At first, we had stood there, watching them test, but found this to be less conducive and awkward. In light of this, we decided to distance ourselves once they had begun testing, letting the users try our application and communicate among each other, observing them from afar. With this method, we found that users could explore our application more naturally since our application requires physical movement, such as in the "Artifact Hunt'' stage. Once they indicated that they had finished, we queried them on their experience. In summary, we found that the "Artifact Hunt" stage was still a major issue; it was unclear for the user to grasp the message they needed to discover the artifact in the museum. Thus, in this final iteration of the project’s timespan, we focused on improving the “Artifact Hunt” flow.
Alteration 4: We animated a large index—a magnifying glass—and instruction, and used an actual photo of the designated place to make the "Artifact Hunt" stage introduction more lively and inviting to grab the user's attention (Universal Design Principle #4). We shifted the "Quiz" to the next stage instead of merging all the actions on one page—by doing so, we can utilize the primary CTA on the "Artifact Hunt" page to focus more on finding the artifacts and showing the progress to motivate users. The overall change can be seen as purposeful disruption, as we did not want users to simply ignore a convivial message, skipping out on a task. The image also acts as another source of information, and perhaps by including something from the ‘real world’ would allow them to have a clearer association of where they ought to be.
Reflection
The strength of our project is that we have comprehensive actual data from the involvement of all stakeholders, both museum officers and visitors. The data and assistance from museum officers assisted us in understanding the museum's history, the visitors' behavior and motivation, the needs and challenges of the museum, and the tour flow in this museum.
However, we realized that the biggest challenge was to develop an intuitive and simple UX flow for this reasonably complex tour feature. In this case, creating a smooth UX flow requires the involvement of various visitor' types to do the testing repeatedly, which requires considerable effort and time. Besides, the weakness of our project is its practicability in realizing this project considering the current financial and political conditions of the Evolution Museum. Although the museum's Head of Public Department supports this initiative, this project demands a tremendous effort to be implemented and would not be compatible with the current state of the museum.
For me personally, this project taught me a lot about multicultural collaboration that I had not encountered before in the workplace:
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Communication and respect are critical when working with a group from diverse cultures. One of the best drives in the group is the ability to control one's ego while learning to respect the viewpoints of others.
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Being on the same frequency and understanding each other's aim kept us motivated during a lengthy project. It’s funny how our initial goal was to merely pass this assignment and that being mediocre was sufficient. As time went on, we developed the same frequency and became invested in this project, which made us eager to put in "extra effort." We realized that it isn't always about the grades or competing with other teams to the top; sometimes, it's about utilizing this experience to become a better team player and be explorative as we want to make mistakes and learn during the product development process.
Sending my deepest gratitude to... 💌
the team, Eve, Elsie, and Nouman, for giving your best to make this project a success as well as your guys cooperation and consideration for one another throughout the seven-week project.
Last but not least, to the museum officers, Elin Stål and Henrik for being incredibly helpful and supportive!