The collectable content or “My Collection” was deployed within our newest permanent gallery called ‘Pou Kanohi, New Zealand at War’. Which is part of the Museum’s WW1 centenary commemorations and also our first war gallery dedicated to formal learners — specifically school years 5–13. That meant that in development we worked closely with teachers to understand the needs of their students; and it is also the reason that we aspired to create a highly interactive gallery, with a suite of digital experiences to suit different learning styles.
Why Collectable Content?
The overall objective of the collectable content or “My Collection:” was to Provide ways for formal learners to gather content quickly throughout the gallery, meaning students had more time to look at objects rather than lots and lots of text.
This was a pilot for us that is still running. And in a nut-shell it gave the ability for students (or the general public) to ‘save’ content that interested them via a ‘My Collection’ Card
The User Journey
Just to talk through this process in a bit more detail…
There is this red kiosk (See below) located within the gallery that would dispense the ‘My Collection’ cards. The visitor gets this card, which has a unique identifier and QR code on the back.
Visitors could then go and go save content from any of the Chronology and Letters interactives, 11 interactives in Total.
When the visitor is using the interactive and they find a piece for content that they would like to capture and read more about later. For example this piece if content here, a letter that lieutenant Harry Dansey often wrote to his sweetheart Pat..
There is this symbol with a Infrared Scanner next to the interactive. They place their card under the scanner, the interactive then prompts the visitor to place in their email address.
In case you missed the card kiosk you can also save content from the interactive without it. There is a ‘Save Content’ call to action on pieces of content, where you can place in your email address to collect the content directly.
Finally, that piece of content gets sent to the visitors unique web landing page identified with their card. We also emailed them so they have the unique link of their account for the future.
The Numbers
Here is the generic top level Analytics for this experience. This data was collected from 8th March to 8th October 2018 as analytics for the interactives were not set up after the gallery opened, which is another lesson in itself.
Over a 7 month period There have been a total over 16, 000 ‘saves’ by visitors across 292 pieces of content .
The most frequently saved letter across all the letter saves was ‘A call to all single men’ (470 Saves).
Having 1,713 page views. Despite large amount of interaction with this letter, it may not be actually representative of its popularity as this letter is more readily accessible than other letters. It is one of the first letters seen in the user journey..
Overall though this letter comprised of only 3% of all visitors ‘saves’. This demonstrates that visitors are selecting a wide range of content to save. On average, visitors collected 4 pieces of content. The number of content pieces collected ranged of 0 to 172 pieces.
Learnings
The following learnings are a mix of visitor marketing research and Google Analytics
Clear Instructions With Support
- Visitors found scanning the card challenging in gallery. Many visitors initially pressed the card against the symbol.
- Other visitors, particularly children, enjoyed the activity of saving content to their card, but had little intention of viewing this content offsite.
- When the My Collection card box was found, visitors struggled to understand the words described as ‘content’ and ‘digital interactives’. Some visitors expected scanning the card to bring up different information on the screen in-gallery.
- There were no guides of visitor hosts to help. And, as this was located at the end of the chronology wall, Visitors often found the My Collection card box towards the end of their visit.
- Visitors entered their email address to send themselves letters before finding the cards.
- Some children have also registered cards to the email addresses of their friends in addition to themselves, sending their friends content as a hilarious joke.
Minimise the steps involved
- We have too many steps in this process, it’s a cliche I know but the best processes are the simplest. Why would we get the visitor to place in their email address when we’ve already given then a unique code?
Test, Optimise, Repeat
- Another obvious point, but it’s not hard to test the concept even with paper prototyping before placing it on the floor, we are very lucky with our visitors as they are open and mostly keen to participate in helping us.
Enable what visitors are already doing
- Visitors already collect their own content by taking pictures, selfies, videos etc. Rather than creating something bespoke, how can we better enable the visitors or students to connect with stories and have their own enquiry with their own devices.
Analytics (Recap)
So given we didn’t actually launch with analytics and that was a a big learning in itself. But just to recap..
Analytics are important, it’s another way to gather insights and it’s pretty low cost to implement. Even if you don’t know what to measure just yet, just place a tag in and keep working on the why.
But It’s also hard. Session views in Google Analytics for on floor experiences just don’t work. People walk away from screens mid session, you have multiple people using a screen at once. There’s just some things that Google Analytics can’t see, which leads me to my next point.
That Google Analytics alone, just isn’t enough. A hybrid approach of gathering Visitor Marketing Research and Google Analytics is key, so the data you’re gathering is both quantitative and qualitative. If you don’t have a research team just observe on the floor, even ask your visitors directly what they think. It’s easy to get disconnected from what people are actually doing.
And once you’ve got the analytics, define which insights truly matter. We had the average time spent on screen being 1min 20 seconds ..but is this reflective of ‘engaged’ users? What if we filtered out users that drop off under 5 seconds. This could be a good measure of our “real users”
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This article is part of our presentation at NDF (National Digital Forum New Zealand) 2018. Click here to see the full presentation
Special mention & thanks to my colleagues and predecessors that helped make this project possible. Including, Nils Pokel, Ben Bradford, Lesley Fredericksen and the Gallery Renewal Team.
