Design Process Documentation

Brief Recap on Basic Idea, Target Group, Personas and Scenarios

The ideas we collected during the first exercise were rather broad and not targeted at any specific group of museum visitors. At the end we summarized the results of our brain storming session in our first blog post. However, most of those ideas revolve around one common pain point that most museums share, which is the lack of interaction. In later stages this turned out to also hold true for the museum of our choice (Naturhistoriska Museet). Thus, our basic idea was to make the museum visit a more fun and educational worthwhile experience.  

After coming up with random ideas that might tackle that problem, we decided to start from scratch rather then to try to solve unknown problems. This was also the moment when we decided to first define a target group in order to derive known problems and pain points. At the end we picked school children as our target group, as they seemed to be the most challenging and interesting to us.
After the interviews we refined our target group's age from 4-14 to 7-12 years, according to a variety of experiences we made during the interview process, which can be found in our group State of the Art Analysis analysis, as well as in the single interviews.

• Group "State of the Art Analysis"
• Interview Johan
• Interview Alex
• Interview Jessie
• Interview Petter
• Interview Thomas

We decided to do two separate personas for our project, which are complementing each other. 

• Primary: A child, Jakob (10 years old)
• Secondary: A mother, Maria (41 years old)   

In short, both of them can be described as active, ambitious and enquiring. Furthermore, those personal traits are the reason why they are also quite tech-savvy. More Details about their background and personality can be found in the following blog post: Personas and Scenarios

Moreover, the scenarios mentioned in this same blog post also reflect the pain points of our personas, which in turn more or less represent our target group. Those pain points are: 

• Not enough interactive activities
• Too long text descriptions
• Slow interactive software
• Lack of feedback
• An exhibit is closed
• Lack of information on their website
• Not enough information about the topic   

The two highlighted pain points are the ones that are the most important to our design proposal, as we believe that the others can be easily solved by the museum, by investing either money or effort.    

Design Proposal 

In order to get to our design proposal which approaches the highlighted pain points we needed both the third exercise, as well as a group follow up meeting.
In exercise three we first took the two pain points and played the "Yes, and.." game with both of them. 

Too long text 

Not enough interaction

Even more interaction

After which we designed the following three ideas.

Commercial Idea - "A game"

The first idea is a game, where a quiz decides which animals punches the other. However, after reviewing the idea within the whole group it occurred to us that fighting animals might not be a suitable solution for kids. This aspect then got changed to animals that gain something instead of punching each other. Thus, instead of animals fighting the idea came up that it could also be a monkey who gets a banana for each correctly answered question. At the end this game tries to enhance the experience with text and by that more or less tackles the first pain point - too much text. 

Crazy Idea - "Movements and Sounds"

The second idea is more concerned with interaction, where we thought of either a game that is controlled by movements or by making sounds. 

In terms of movement we thought of a game where one could try to immediate the movements of animals, which could be fed with general information about the animal.

The other part or second idea was to have a game where one has to imitate the sounds of a certain kind of animal. After reviewing this idea it was soon clear that the first one might be hard to do combine with educational content, while the second one might be very noisy, especially if several players play this game. During the idea review process it immediately became clear that we as a team focus more on the sound part of the idea and decided to change the "imitation part" to be a "match a sound to a picture" part, as it then is easier to control the noise level of the game.  
We also thought about smell, but    

The Third Idea - GPS Tracking 

The third idea was to track the movement of people at the museum to get visual information of how they move and thereby what parts are more popular. To do this every person (that wanted to participate) would have their movement tracked, recorded and then displayed on a map of the museum that can be seen on either a smartphone or one of the touchscreen maps inside the museum. The map show the museum with its art pieces and how people have been moving around. It would also indicate where people have spent more time, since when you stand still your track keep getting thicker. When combining the tracks for all people you could then tell if people have just walked past one art piece or if people tend to stop and look at it. The picture below show a mockup of how a room could look on the map, with tracks of people and how they have moved around the five pieces that is in the room. You can also tell that blue stopped for a long time to watch the bottom right object.

During the idea review process we also talked about heat maps that can be created based on the tracking and which can be used by the museum to adapt exhibitions, according to certain patterns. However, at the end we all agreed that this is hard to be used in order to improve the museum experience of kids.

The Combined Idea

After going through all the advantageous and disadvantageous of those three ideas in the exercise, we combined all the ideas in a group follow up meeting. 

The final result is a game where a player has to match different animal sounds to projected pictures of animals onto a big circular interactive wall. The wall in this case is used to shield the rest of the room from the noise of the animal sounds. We also decided to let the lower part of the wall open, so that people from the outside can see the movements that are going on inside. This should accomplish two goals. First, to increase the interests of people from the outside and second, to make it a lighter instead of a dark room. 

One round of the game would look like the following: 

A kid goes into the circle and sensors recognize that new players joined the game, lights are changed accordingly into a more fitting environment (e.g., jungle, sea, etc.).  

The child stands in the middle of a circular room that is not closed, but open at two opposite sides.

Directed Speakers start to make one animal sound after the other. The child starts to run to a picture on the wall that matches the sound of the animal. If it is the right animal both, an animation and changing lights indicate the correct match. There is also a tree in the room where a monkey sits at the very bottom. After the kid matched his first animal and sound pair correctly the monkey starts to climb up. For each correctly matched sound the monkey climbs higher up until it reaches the top, where a banana waits for the monkey. This is when the game stops.

During the kid is playing the parents read more detailed information about one particular animal (e.g., where it lives, or what it eats, etc.) every time the child matches a sound and an animal correctly. The texts either flash below or above the animals, while the animation for a correct match is played.     

Different parts of the first three ideas that were considered/integrated for the final design : 

• Game (Commercial, Crazy) 
• Interaction using your body (Crazy) 
• Score and Feedback (Commercial) 
• Lights and Sensors (GPS)

The following sketches try to capture how we imagine the room: 

and finally, the amazing Team and Drakis (doing all the hard work) our new friend that we found in one of those lovely seminar rooms.