Nick Cristea, AllofUs, September 2016
There is a growing volume of best practice guidance, case studies and reference material for the practice of applying user experience design principles to interfaces, and increasingly to the products themselves, but there is almost none available to help those wanting to adopt better UX methodology when designing visitor experiences for exhibitions, events or retail.
Whilst it could be argued that these are no more than a series of interactions with distinct exhibits (however analogue or digital they may be), the way that visitors orientate themselves, navigate around a space, and interact in depth with their surroundings has a major impact in how people engage with individual exhibits and should be carefully choreographed.
As a designer it is an exciting space to work in, and we hope that by sharing our experience from the last 13 years this article will provide some thought starters and provoke more conversation on the topic.
By stepping back and considering the full context of a ‘visit’ it becomes clear that a strategic approach with ‘design thinking’, similar to that of service design, is a good place to start. There are however some very unique challenges related to designing visitor experiences and this has led us to developing a range of tools that we will describe as part of this article.
To keep it simple I have broken it down in nine distinct sections, and have covered everything related to designing for groups in a separate article which you can find here.
The first two sections relate specifically to the communication objectives, the story that we are trying to tell and how we want to engage people in the subject. They can and should be done before any consideration of the physical space itself as they guide the underlying strategy.
1. Narrative Arc and Experience Objectives
There should always be an underlying story that threads its way through every aspect of a visitor’s experience. In retail this is most often driven by the brand story or vision, with some reference to the current campaigns, and of course to seasons if you are working with a fashion brand.
With museums and galleries the story is normally set by the in-house editorial team, where there are already curators on hand who are guiding the selection of artefacts and who are responsible for the rationale that underpins these choices. With brand focused visitor centres, exhibitions or events the story may often be written in partnership with the client and/or their brand and marketing agencies.
Even permenant event spaces that host a ongoing series of events with varying thematic focus will have an underlying story to tell which will underpin the overarching approach.
The second critical component for any successful strategy is the definition of what the experience objectives are. Within retail making facilitating purchases is often the natural focal point, but a store has many other important roles to play for customers such as; brand experience, product research, and customer service.
The underlying objectives will vary from project to project but the following five are a good starting point: Entertaining, Memorable, Communicative, Social, Empowering.
- It must entertain people so that they are captivated long enough to deliver the other experience objectives.
- It must resonate with consumers as a memorable positive brand experience, a reward for venturing out of their homes, a reason to visit again, and to engage further online.
- It must communicate its overarching messages and deliver depth in layers of content that users can dive into.
- It must create drama worth sharing with other people present as well as with remote friends and family. Theatrical, surprising and refreshing moments that compel people to stop and share. The more visually arresting these moments are the better these travel across social media and the greater the viral advocacy.
- It should empower or educate users with new found abilities or knowledge that enable them feel enlightened, smarter and more in control.
By establishing these up front it is a lot easier to establish the criteria for success and to plan on how best to evaluate them. By scoring the degree to which each interaction performs against its objectives we can also compare and overlay them as a set. In this way we can have different unique flavours of interaction that vary in their core objectives whilst always ensuring that they add up as a whole.
The illustration above is from a recent client project and shows how it works in practice. The strategic objectives used here were agreed in partnership with the client specifically for one of their new experience centres.
2. Engagement Principles
If we now take a more visitor centred view of the world it is most noticeable that it is almost impossible to come up with a one size fits all solution.
There can often be three generations of visitors within the same space, a large proportion of visitors with English as a second language and a high degree of variation in the expertise of visitors with regard to the subject or even with the idea of interactive exhibits in general.
If we also consider the need to cater for visitors who may have physical impairments or learning difficulties, you can see why it is so important to ensure that there is a healthy variety of solutions to how we engage, deliver and reinforce the story to people.
This necessitates support for different learning styles: auditory, visual or kinesthetic; delivered through a healthy mix of analogue, digital, 2D and 3D, and of course a variety of approaches to interaction mechanics — input devices, output technologies and UI paradigms.
Even though there is no perfect exhibit, by carefully planning each experience we can usually create a mixture that delivers something for everyone. We tackle this with a two pronged approach in which we create behaviour profiles for visitors that describe their assumed interaction style, and at the same time create outline experience profiles for potential exhibits (which we will cover in due course).
Part One: Behaviour profiles for visitors
The behaviour profiles will be familiar to anyone working in UX as they are simply pen portraits that have been extended to include an understanding of attention span, literacy, mobility factors, sensory drivers and learning styles.
In order to keep the number of visitor behaviour profiles to a minimum we look to find and group similar ones. Ideally you should have less than six and each should have clear differentiators in terms of motivations, needs and behaviour.
There are also as number of group profiles that need to be created as visitors have tendency to affect each other’s behaviour when they visit together, but this has already been covered in another article, available here, and is therefore omitted from this story.
Part Two: Experience profiles for potential exhibits
It is of course very early in the process to start describing the exhibits, these will be very much shaped by the physical environment and the way that we expect visitors to move through it, but we can begin to lay down markers in terms of ensuring that all of the key story components are being told, and that we are doing so in an appropriate variety of ways.
So that there is a consistent way of describing and comparing exhibit concepts we produce an experience profile for each one, using a set of paired experience descriptors with a sliding scale between the two opposites. These profiles are then continually updated and refined as we move through the design process.
There are in fact two dimensions of each exhibit that need to be considered. It’s physical manifestation profile and it’s content profile. They are shown here as separate sets of experience sliders but can also be combined into a single scorecard.
The above sliders can be used for many types of experience but they were specifically crafted for a corporate exhibition and events space. Different projects may have different objectives and criteria that would warrant a slightly different set of sliders.
Finally it is worth noting that whilst these tools are a highly useful way of describing each exhibit they really come into their own when you overlay them with each other to get a sense of the entire visitor experience.
With tools to describe both visitors and exhibits we can begin to match them up to identify whether there is a good balance or whether there are specific gaps to address.
3. Physical context — architecture & environmental
The third factor unique to visitor experiences is that of the physical context in which it occurs.
Working within an existing space the physical architecture itself will often dictate the approach; suggesting where and how to create different types of experiences because of natural sightlines, architectural canvases, pinch points or quiet corners.
Where these do not add up to a coherent experience it becomes necessary to add new architectural structures that provide the required conditions. This may mean darkening spaces, creating sheltered alcoves or even introducing media neutral transition spaces that cleanse a visitor’s sensory palette in preparation for a new experience.
Ambient light levels and background noise are always important considerations, and a good place to start especially as they can vary so dramatically with the time of day and the day of the week.
Without creating distinct containers for each interactive it is almost impossible to prevent noise or light bleed and unless the objective is to create a mind altering cacophony, it is therefore imperative to understand where, when and how to take advantage of it and where to shield for more private, reflective experiences. When creating new spaces it is worth considering how these might also act as physical landmarks to help attract and orientate visitors, as well as form more unique and memorable experiences.
Eevn with existing spaces the floor plans and architectural elevations are our ‘goto’ tools for quickly sketching out how we could create spaces within spaces and how that will affect the visitor journey; their sightlines, movement and behaviour.
Using the plans facilitates the necessary close collaboration with lighting designers and acoustics specialists, who can help to ensure that the physical space is always working in harmony and reinforcing the underlying narrative and experience objectives for each interactive. They are a quick way of sketching and communicating ideas before moving onto three dimensional renders of the spaces and scale models.
4. Flow and Dwell
One of the most under-utilised tools in the design of visitor experiences is the flow and dwell study that architects produce to satisfy health and safety officers, and fire inspectors. By taking an estimated maximum number of visitors and the impact of the architecture in how people will move they help to map out the main thoroughfares and pinch points within any building.
This is a hugely useful starting point for imagining where visitors will feel comfortable slowing down to consider navigational options, where they might be likely to pause for rest, and of course where we need to encourage them to continue moving. It also provides an insight into where natural sightlines will be compromised by other visitors, and from that, how and where we should provide visual landmarks to navigate by.
The flow and dwell studies and the physical space floor plans are also a particularly useful tool when it comes to roleplaying the movement of visitors through the space.
The format in which we receive flow and dwell reports is often just a dry numeric report, but they can be easily translated into graphical tools that provide a quick visual reference for how people will move around the space and a basis for ‘what if’ roleplay scenarios that allow us to imagine the experience for a multitude of different visitors types.
And, by extending the visual language of these routes we can explore different journeys for different visitors, varying in duration, content specialism or even target age, as well as map out the difference between weekend and weekday visits, mornings and afternoons, not to mention what happens when visitors need the bathroom.
From a flow and dwell perspective, thresholds are notoriously tricky because clients often want to place their introductory interpretation there but visitors are often eager to get inside and get started and don’t slow down to digest anything, thus entering the space unaware of the overarching narrative and context.
And if we create something amazing that gets people to stop and engage then you can quite quickly create congestion issues that restricts access to the threshold content and the space itself.
For some experiences we can get around this by choreographing a timed entry for groups of visitors who have to queue for a closed room introductory experience, often a linear filmic one, which then releases them into the exhibition space. However, starting with a queue in this way creates operational issues of its own, it also raises visitor expectations of what comes next and can frustrate or inhibit the casual drop-in visitor.
Another solution is to ensure that the threshold interpretation is less than 10 words, can be easily consumed without slowing or pausing, and can be seen even when the space is at maximum capacity. To support this approach, you need to ensure that an extended narrative is reinforced at each and every interaction point so that it is clearly understood by every visitor regardless of their route and choice of exhibits.
A good example is the threshold piece for the Atmosphere gallery where we were asked to set the tone, brand the gallery and communicate the key messages. On one level this worked well, but in other ways it failed. Everyone knew the name of the gallery but no one stopped long enough to read the interpretation text.
There was too much of it and we had to make it smaller than we wanted as well as pacing it out over an animation sequence. Unfortunately because of the sightlines the visual draw of the gallery was very strong and no one stopped long enough to read it. This resulted in many visitors stepping into a space with very little awareness of the overarching context until we dramatically cut down the volume of content.
5. Sightlines and interpretation levels
Borne out both by our own experience, and from extensive research done by Science Museum, British Museum and the Tate, is the fact that you cannot ever assume that your visitors will look at the things you want them to.
The environmental factors of the physical space in combination with the volume of visitors at that moment in time will affect how they move and what comes into view. And the speed at which they move will affect how much they turn their heads to look around.
Most visitors move around a space with their gaze fixed straight ahead, they can occasionally be persuaded to look up or down but very rarely notice things outside of their natural field of vision unless explicitly guided in some way.
This was a challenge that we were explicitly tasked to solve for the Chelsea Harbour shopping centre where they wanted to drive foot traffic to the upper levels. By designing visual animations that began at eye level on the ground floor and then flowed up through the atrium onto giant screens on the upper level we were able to direct the gaze of shoppers towards the brands featured on other floors, increasing awareness and encouraging movement.
Ultimately if something is important it needs to be big, simple, high up and in a direct line of sight to the route visitors are expected to take. Of course this approach only works when used sparingly, too much will create a visual cacophony that will exhaust visitors and create counter productive confusion.
The approach we take is to carefully plan how we use both design and technology to progressively engage people in the story and how we can coerce them to move around the space.
For every point of interaction we ensure that we can successfully connect with visitors from varying distances. These are generally broken down into a three pronged approach: Attract, Engage, and Interact, which are applied to the distances of >5m, <5m and <2m respectively.
Attracting people from a distance
Ensuring that we can draw visitors towards the points of interaction from afar, and from very different potential viewpoints, requires a close collaboration with the architects, lighting consultants and interior/exhibition designers.
The aim is to create visually distinct, photo sharing worthy, landmarks that can be clearly seen from a distance and that begin to tell the story with which the exhibit has been tasked in communicating. The last bit is of course the hardest.
To start to solve this every exhibit should have its own experience objectives, and primary, secondary and tertiary messages, as agreed with the content specialists, curators or editors.
In its attract mode the exhibit should be able to communicate the primary message, or at least provide the user with a sense of the topic that it covers, because, in reality visitors very rarely look for labels and are much less aware of any thematic spatial groupings that may have seemed obvious in the design phase. Whilst it feels like overkill at the time, every point of interaction should therefore use its ‘attract’ mode to signpost it’s own existence and subject focus, ensuring that visitors are mentally prepared when they approach. This can of course be done simply with the physical form, colour and materials before we even begin to think about the use of typography, graphic visuals and technology.
Engaging people to pause
Once people are within close proximity to an interpretative experience it is possible to introduce a secondary level of communication that reinforces the overarching theme and the objectives of this specific exhibit.
Designing for visitor sightlines will still need to take into account the number of people present, and whether there are already people up close who are interacting with the exhibit, but we can at least assume that visitors are physically close enough to examine more granular detail in the three dimensional form, visual imagery, audio narration and typographic language.
Unfortunately it is easy to get too ambitious in how much we want visitors to consume at this point. The wall of text never works and yet many clients insist on it as they just have too much to communicate. As humans we are pre-programmed to digest small succinct factoids, neatly concise stories that are easy to remember and compelling to share. Everything that we want to say, to engage people and persuade them to linger and interact, needs to be distilled into single sentence bullet points. One line, one fact.
Another important objective at this distance is for the interactive to intuitively communicate to visitors how it is designed to be interacted with and experienced. This can be done both by ensuring that sightlines enable clear visibility of how other people are using it, as well as through the use of its physical form and layout to communicate affordance of use.
Design a semi circular exhibit with a plinth centre stage and visitors will naturally approach, likewise, screens that are at waist height and angled towards visitors, or even arcade style steering wheels. These exhibits operate within a known frame of reference for most people.
But if you disguise the interaction, with hidden gesture cameras, motion sensors or floor based sensor pads, visitors will need a lot more help.
To ensure that visitors are not scared off at this point we use a combination of visual hints and clues that can be printed onto surrounding surfaces as well as choreographed attract loops that invite visitors to approach and that suggest how to interact. With these types of ‘zero affordance’ interactions it is critical that the exhibits provide immediate, reassuring and expected responses to the visitors who step forward into the interaction space.
Interacting in layers
Visitors can be easily put off interacting. If something appears complex they often worry about breaking it or looking stupid when they can’t operate it. On the flip side, those who approach without fear expect everything to work immediately and within their conceptual frame of use. Any deviation from their expectations in terms of feedback or any lag in the system response will lead them to walk away unsatisfied.
We learnt early on that the most successful interactions start off as very simple natural experiences. Built on existing affordances visitors approach with the confidence that they know how to use the controls and we reward them by ensuring that everything responds as they would expect.
The trick is to then slowly introduce surprising additional layers of interaction, control and reaction. They act as rewards for continued engagement and exploration, as well as the gateway into a far more powerful and expressive form of interactive engagement with the content.
These layers are also perfect for delivering the interpretation content, presenting high level factoids and then slowly revealing more depth as visitors continue to interact and show interest in the subject, they provide a highly valuable tool for putting the visitor in control of the story and both the pace of depth of their learning.
This extended content can of course take the form of text, audio, animations or video but it can also be more subtly communicated through the reveal of increasingly complex interactions, interfaces which support a more hands on approach of learning by doing rather than reading, watching or listening.
6. Rhythm & Pace
If we then step back once more to think of the visitor experience as a whole, you can start to see how important it is to choreograph the journey; anticipating how visitors will move, what they will see as they navigate and where they will slow, pause, stop, speed up or even double back.
Equipped with a set of simple roleplay tools, the plans, the elevations and the flow and dwell study, the design team set about envisioning different journeys. The overall duration of a visitors experience will vary depending on who they are, with whom they are visiting, and how much time they have allocated. If it is a single destination experience they may have as much 90 minutes to spare, but if it is one space within a larger complex the average will be much lower, somewhere between 10 and 25 minutes.
Either way the duration at each interactive point is never much more than two minutes, and often less than one. Interestingly, when the space is quieter people actually tend to stay less long at any single point because there are more available experiences, whereas, at busy times people tend to dwell at an interactive until they see an opening at another.
The objective when planning the journey for different visitors is to ensure that they all engage with the key threads of the story in ways that are educational, memorable and remarkable. Of course no one visitor will interact with everything and so it is incredibly important that messages are distributed and repeated in subtly different ways.
Since there is such a large possible variation in the age of each visitor (their existing understanding of the subject matter, their learning style and their preferred types of interactions), it is incredibly important to create a balanced variety of experiences.
It is also important to ensure that these are spaced appropriately. No point having all of the large scale visual impact experiences at the beginning, nor room after room of intimate small screen single person interactives.
To keep the visitor interested we need to continually surprise them, we need to ensure that they are using their senses, their minds and their bodies in regular rotation to avoid fatigue and retain engagement.
The architecture itself will guide the first aspect of the creative direction. A long narrow corridor, or double height atrium will foster specific types of behaviour and opportunities for interpretative interventions. A quiet dark corner will be suitable for a very different experience to a noisy public balcony.
Once these cornerstone interactives have been pencilled in it is possible to get an initial outline of the rhythm and flow between exhibits. For example, after a very visual multi player experience it would be better to decompress with a quieter more introspective interactive than another sensory explosion.
And by calming everything down momentarily we can then create a bigger effect when the visitor turns the next corner to see something of scale once more. If the architecture does not have a natural space for this it may be a good idea to create some physical interventions specifically to help.
Most visitor experiences are structured so that the visitor passes through thematic zones within which a number of interactives tell specific stories that support each other. The interactives within these clusters work better without a specific linear order since visitors will drift to the next available point anyway rather than queue and follow a set sequence each time.
The design process works both ways. Initial sketched concepts for an interactive, as driven by the subject matter and engagement objectives, give us a number of possible solutions which are summarised in the experience profiles, and the architecture will show a preference for one of these over the others.
By laying the experience profiles over one another we can get a very quick glimpse of how well balanced the overall cluster is, and by then plotting them sequentially we can determine how well the journey flows through different experiences.
Extrapolate this out across the entire visitor experience and we can get a pretty reliable overview of the rhythm and flow for each visitor. With this mapped out we can then quickly see what will happen if visitors skip certain exhibits. What will they miss, how can this be reinforced elsewhere and if they still get the required breadth of interpretation delivered with a successful variety of engagement techniques. It is a lot easier to move things around at this stage, to playback the results of doing so and to evolve the approach accordingly than to start building the space and adjust the real world architecture during soft launch.
7. Dramatic Effect or The Big Wow
Exit research with visitors repeatedly shows the desire and need for hero exhibits that fuel the conversation between visitors on the way home, as well as with friends and family after the event. These landmark experiences tend to be of scale, visually impressive or multi sensory, unique and highly shareable.
One way of exaggerating this sense of wonder is to empower the visitor with the control to make big things happen. The smaller the trigger the better this works.
One example is when we installed a giant suspended light sculpture in Chelsea Harbour which was connected to three hidden triggers that resided under coloured carpet tiles across the threshold to the space.
Not all visitors would make the connection between their movement across the carpet tiles and the corresponding colour change in the giant chandelier suspended above them, but those who did would immediately look around to see if it was a trick before proceeding to try different colours and all the possible configurations. It transformed what was a purely aesthetic experience into a far more personal, playful and memorable one.
Done well these ‘big wow’ moments become iconic assets for the marketing communications and as such should provide an overarching sense of the exhibition as a whole.
Designing anything that appears in the public sphere also now demands an appreciation for how it will manifest on social media and how this can be used to generate brand awareness, ticket sales and word of mouth advocacy. The potential for reaching an audience of millions is occasionally the design brief itself and we have produced showstopping exhibits that perhaps only reached a few thousand people during their short lifespan on the ground but that created several million views on the internet.
The Carte Noire interactive store window example below only ran in the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford for a week but managed to generate 949,000 views on Youtube.
8. Second screens and augmented visits
Public spaces are undoubtedly one of the hardest things to design for because people can be so unpredictable in their behaviour and their movement, especially when in groups, and increasingly because they are already interacting with their own mobile devices.
Designing for groups is complex enough to warrant it’s own article which can be found here, while the use of mobile devices is a subject of considerable debate on which we can only lightly touch on within this article.
Many of the arguments against using handheld interpretation stem from the theory that it distracts a person’s gaze from the object, or artefact, that they have come to see within a more traditional museum or gallery context. Audio guides are fine because they augment the visual senses, and interpretation labels have forever just been part of the exhibition furniture.
We pretty much buy these arguments, people spend enough time staring at their screens and if that becomes the centre of their attention they might as well interact from home. However, as a device for guiding visitors there is still a very much untapped opportunity, especially when there is a need to engage audiences with widely different interpretation needs, such as adults and young kids, or large groups of visitors with specific educational goals such as a school class, not to mention visitors with different first languages.
In these instances the latest generation of smartphones can provide excellent navigational aids and interpretative support, guiding, challenging, recording and rewarding the exploration of every visitor. If designed well these can actively link the experience to the objects or artefacts themselves — drawing attention to specific details by questioning visitors in a way that only a successful response will unlock the next part of the journey.
Whilst this sounds very much like a treasure hunt, and it can certainly be packaged in that way for some audiences, this is not unlike any linear guided tour that many visitors enjoy. It provides confidence and purpose, fascinating takeaway facts coupled with navigational aids, whilst always ensuring that the emphasis is on the exhibits, artefacts or interactives within the space.
As bluetooth beacons, indoor GPS and wifi based navigation solutions improve so the technology becomes increasingly invisible, and the opportunity to augment the experience without ever interrupting it becomes ever greater. Within the advent of smartwatches and bluetooth connected headphones, and the opportunity therein to create highly personalised ‘hearable’ or ‘glanceable’ experiences, we can imagine that self guided augmented tours will become a core part of interpretation strategies in the future.
Everything we do now includes a consideration for a BYOD (bring your own device) strategy and attempts to future proof against it even if it is not included at launch. Our most recent project in this area is a digital interpretation system for the Serpentine gallery in London which has over 1 million visitors every year.
With two galleries situated a few hundred meters apart in the middle of Hyde park the gallery was keen to extend the notion of a visitor to anyone within WiFi proximity of either building. By offering free WiFi that extended some way beyond the physical walls they are now able to engage new audiences in the park whilst also enhancing the visitor experience for everyone who visits either or both galleries.
Our main challenge was to use the free WiFi as an effective way of engaging visitors outside of the gallery with compelling content, and then enhancing their experience within the galleries without detracting from the the unique moment of being within the space and looking at the artworks themselves.
After several rounds of prototyping with users on site our solution took shape as a contextually smart, well informed companion that travels around with you. Whilst extremely simple to use it is built on top of a very flexible system that curators can experiment with to create different journeys through the same exhibition.
In addition to supporting a fluid web app the system also powers an onsite digital interpretation and wayfinding solution that showcases what’s on nearby as well as the latest Digital Commissions. The common technology platform also means that it has the potential to be leveraged for the main website as well as all the content engine behind their social media channels.
9. Multi channel strategies
The pre and post visit experience is a fantastic opportunity to reinforce the dialogue with, and engagement of, visitors and to promote viral advocacy between friends and family. It is an opportunity to extend the narrative and provide interpretative experiences for virtual visitors some of whom may love aborad and never make it to the physical space.
However, while many clients have supporting websites, these tend to be focused on marketing the visit experience, with a secondary focus on commerce, and/or access to their collections databases that offer a virtual window into their objects and artefacts.
Many have experimented, to varying degrees of success, with standalone apps for smartphones and tablets, and with explorations of virtual environments such as Minecraft, or the Google Art project.
Unfortunately, these always tend to be managed by different departments, disconnected to the experts responsible for the wayfinding and curation of exhibitions within the physical space, and often procured from agencies who are very different to those producing the real world interactives, with no communication between parties.
There is therefore an unsurprising disconnect between what someone sees on their mobile device, or online at home, from what they experience when they get to the physical space. Throw in all the additional social media platforms that so many brands now utilise as marketing channels, and that are often run by separate teams or agencies, and you get a sense of the problem.
People expect a brand to deliver consistency in everything it does across all channels, including the real world, they move between them without thinking but they are not yet treated with a single customer view.
Any successful visitor experience must now include a complete multi channel strategy that imagines how someone will engage with the brand, pre, during, and post visit, across all the touchpoints. The basic principles of Attraction, Acquisition, Engagement, Retention, Revenue and Referral are relevant to every touchpoint and should be designed so that they consistently reinforce each other.
Many of the tools outlined in this document can be used to identify and plan for visitor interactions both on and offline and to understand how meaningful relationships will form and evolve over time.
Not only will this ensure a much more consistent and rewarding experience for visitors, regardless of how they choose to engage, but it will also provide tangible efficiencies in terms of content publishing, marketing, educational programmes, ticket sales and e-commerce objectives.
With a clear strategy and a common technology platform it then becomes possible to start joining everything up.
Including pre and post visit objectives within the design briefs for all on-gallery interactives facilitates the production of meaningful app or web based experiences with little to no extra cost. Many of the authoring tools are now cross platform and even though the interface paradigms may vary the content themes and interaction principles will work across all formats and devices.
And, by integrating the principles of social sharing into the real world experience you can fuel the event marketing by designing exhibits that produce meaningful and personal digital assets that drive post visit online activity.
There is no one size fits all solution of course but by making this pre and post thinking part of the design brief, unique multi channel strategies and ideas can be created at source rather than as expensive tactical bolt ons further down the line.
For our part we are continuing to push our clients to consider the holistic world that their visitors, customers or consumers inhabit and always start from there when working on new projects.
In addition to the work for the Serpentine, which starts from a mobile BYOD perspective, we have been making inroads into a more multi channel approach by designing and building interpretative systems that manifest in the real world but that are capable of fuelling pre and post visit activity through online channels and social media platforms.
A good example of this is the interpretation system that has just been launched in trial format (as of Sepetember 2016) for the redeveloped Renaissance and Enlightenment galleries at the British Museum.
Tasked with creating something that would “sympathetically fit” with the historical features of the galleries, and that would help visitors unlock further information about the collections, the interpretation system is built around vertical totems that provide simple animated stories on exhibits and their location within each gallery.
Part interpretation and part way-finding they encourage visitors to explore the galleries further, enhancing the visitor’s knowledge and understanding of the rarities exhibited without detracting from the objects themselves.
Whilst this is currently only accessible on gallery it has been both designed and engineered to be used online and to roll out onto the mobile devices of visitors in due course.
Takeaways
There should be no fundamental distinction in the way that a brand engages it’s audience based on the platform or channel, digital or analogue. Clearly each medium and context introduces different considerations and opportunities that need to be considered and taken advantage of, but at the heart of each engagement is a member of the public who never stops to think that how they interact with a brand should differ based on where they are or how they are choose to engage.
There are huge benefits in the power of engagement, and the loyalty that it promotes, when a brand can connect all of it’s activities in a meaningful way. Not to mention the operational efficiencies and cost savings when technological platforms can be integrated, and content assets shared.
Our work in creating the tools and processes for Visitor Experience strategies was originally informed by our experience in producing websites and apps and with a holistic approach to customer engagement now has the potential to join everything.
The only significant stumbling block to this happening is the siloed budgets, philosophies and organisational structures that companies continue to insist forcing upon their audiences. To succeed in the modern age everything must originate and centre around the customer, strategies must switch to being human centric rather than business centric and budgets must be pooled and allocated for cross divisional projects with multiple channel stakeholders.
Despite the fact that our work has always been agnostic to channel or platform, and that our clients are highly diverse in nature, it is rare to find someone who has both the appetite and the ability to establish true multi channel projects.
As markets grow ever more competitive, and digital first brands move into the physical world, with fully connected systems and a single view of a customer, true multi channel visitor/consumer experiences will become a necessity rather than a luxury.
We hope that the tools and processes that we have outlined in this article are a useful starting point for anyone who needs to try and design for how consumers will interact with them in the real world and that they help in satisfying better multi channel customer engagement practices.
Thanks
AllofUs has been incredibly fortunate to attract some very talented people and without these exceptional visual designers, creative technologists, user experience designers and project managers, none of the projects referenced in this document would have be possible.
So in no particular order I would like to thank:
Mark Hauenstein, Leslie Quarcoopome, Tom Moody, Nic Mulvaney, Tim Diacon, Ting Yu, Tim Crook, Sarah Gautier, Silje Rodvik, Phil McNeil, Matt Barnes, Marie Laurent, Laura Lejano, Kamran Karvani, Jem Robinson, JC Ehle, Chris Mullany, Hana Sutch, Geoff Moore, Gemma Lane, Emma Johnson, Derek Boatang, Daniel Felstead, Blaise Galinier, Rob Millington, Maximo Recio, Steve Johnson, Will Grace, Miquel Lopez, Matt James, Andreas Odenahl, Richard Sullivan, Lilly Mader, Jon Caplin, Laura Pison and Saul Hardman.
If you have any specific questions related to the projects referenced, or want to check out the many other projects we do, you can find more details on our website Allofus.com, and you can contact myself or Orlando Mathias, who has also been here from the very beginning.
We hope you enjoyed reading and found something interesting to takeaway. We have a number of other articles planned which we will announce via Twiiter. Follow us at @allofustweet
