Our breakfast meet up with Béatrice de Reyniès, from Grévin International
For our fourth “Experts” breakfast meet up, we had the pleasure of receiving Béatrice de Reyniès, Director of Development at Grévin International. Together, we realized for Ban’s Mansion the “Chaplin’s World” app, dedicated to the life and work of Charlie Chaplin.
Grévin International manages several cultural leisure sites. Their challenge is double: preserving the high-standard visit of a large audience and being able to provide tourists from all around the world with quality information. In the case of Ban’s Mansion — Chaplin’s World, the heritage dimension of the site was crucial. Grévin International wanted to highlight both the personal life of Charlot and his commitment and artistic approach. This scientific requirement is reflected in the design of the mobile app, which displays several original documents, including personal photographs of the artist.
A two-stage design
A first version of “Chaplin’s World” is published in the stores in 2016: the app is available in three languages and only concerns the tour within the manor.
The app immediately meets a great success. Its downloading is constantly increasing, thanks to an efficient on site communication: screens present the app and invite visitors to download it. This download is especially easier and encouraged since Wi-Fi is available in all spaces of the establishment. Thus, by studying a map of the number of downloads per country, it appears that the app is mostly downloaded in Switzerland, on site.
A few months later, a second version comes out in the stores. This one is available in 11 languages - including Russian, Japanese and Chinese. If you follow the blog, you guessed right: the mobile app Chaplin’s World is in 2-step. 😉
This is not the only novelty proposed by this V2. This version also incorporates a new feature: automatic triggering of content, enable by the installation of several beacons in the mansion.
These Bluetooth tags allow indoor geolocation and are managed directly from the smArtPublisher, just like your other content. Each POI is associated with a specific space within the manor. Thanks to these tags and interior geolocation, when a visitor enters a space, the content associated with that space is automatically triggered. At Ban’s Manor, each room is associated with only one POI. Thus, visitors can move around the room without fear of activating new content — an annoying phenomenon if any. The visit experience becomes more fluid and intuitive: no smartphone to handle, the information comes from itself to the visitor when he actually needs it.
Daily application
Why would you choose a digital “tour guide” rather than an audio guide? Béatrice de Reyniès and the Chaplin’s World teams carefully studied each possibility. The audio guide, a more expensive solution requiring more logistics in terms of storage and maintenance than a app, was finally dismissed.
This choice of digital does not penalize the public who doesn’t own a smartphone. Béatrice de Reyniès emphasizes that information provided by the app complements the bilingual room signs already installed. On the other hand, a paper booklet for the visit remains available at the entrance of the manor for 10 Swiss francs (about 8 euros, while the mobile app is free). Earphones are also on sale at the Chaplin’s Worlf store, for stunned owners of smartphones who have forgotten theirs. Here is an idea to remember!
A time of exchanges
The presentation of the “Chaplin’s World” app by Béatrice de Reyniès continued with a discussion between the smArtapps team and the cultural and tourist actors present. Everyone is free to participate in the discussion, asking questions or sharing his/her experience. It’s an opportunity to share observations and feelings about the installation of a mobile app.
Regularly, a fear emerges during this time of exchange: the fear that visitors, once the app installed, will look at nothing else but their screen. Paul Chaine, Head of the Digital Development Department at the Château de Versailles, invites museums and other cultural staffs to trust their visitors, who came primarily to see artworks and took the time to travel to them. At smArtapps, we can only adhere to this position.
