¡Construir! Team Clemente gets to making
¡Construir! means “to make” in Spanish.
Earlier in the week, our team had to go back to the drawing board per client and user feedback and ideate on a simpler structure than our original intended virtual space. When designing the new structure, we mainly focused on the following three questions.
- How do you represent a single artifact and move between artifacts while providing a cohesive experience?
- How do you allow visitors to engage with the content and reveal really great stories?
- How do you encourage visitors to socially interact with one another virtually?
We came up with several ideas from a virtual scrapbook to a more traditional, one-layer open museum space and created quick prototypes to gauge users’ preferences. And the users have spoken. One structure that everyone seemed to like was an interactive timeline. Taking all the feedback we’ve gathered, we spent the first week building a functional prototype in hopes of testing it the following week.
The interactive timeline
The interactive timeline offers a chronological unravelling of Clemente’s life and stories, which we found that users preferred. The direct structure is simple to navigate and makes a great segway into first-person immersive scenes and opporuntity to share one’s own stories.
We classified events in Clemente’s life into major and minor events, with each type of event having unique stories, graphics, and interaction on the timeline. On the other hand, minor events only appear on the timeline after users have explored the major event preceding it. For major events, such as Clemente joining the Pittsburgh Pirates and marrying Vera, each has its own unique page with pictures, descriptions, and artifacts relating to that event. We played with the aesthetics of the interface and decided to go with a vintage and collage graphics to communicate the concept of brining history to today. To offer another form of organization and exploration of the timeline, we also categorized events on the timeline into three categories — Clemente as a baseball player, family man and humanitarian. Upon entering the major event page, the artifacts would open up to its own pages where users can delve deeper into the story around it.
Artifact pages
Central to our design is the artifact detail pages — these exist to focus and expand on specific photographs, objects, artifacts or stories from Clemente’s life. Using a multimodal approach, artifact detail pages will include a mixture of different mediums and interactions that the user interacts with to learn more about specific elements of Clemente’s life.
For example, for certain detail pages, users would be able to click around a three-dimensional rendering of an object, examining tiny details or inscriptions. On the same page, they might be able to click and watch a video on the history of the object, or photos of it in use, and its significance to Clemente’s life and career.
Earlier, we prototyped several layouts of artifact pages and found that users enjoyed an all-in-one view where the three-dimensional rendering of the artifact and details are in one page. They enjoyed how accessible the information was with one another and how immersive it felt. But users expressed concern that it could be overwhelming. They voiced that they would need more guidance on which piece of information to view first. The information would also need to be broken down into more digestible pieces.
We also learned that users wanted more affordances on what type of information the text box will provide and how much time it requires to view other media on the page (videos or audio). Users also shared other types of information they would like to see. For example, they would love pointers on unique details of the artifacts or to see other pictures of Clemente posed with the artifact, if available. Lastly, we saw in our earlier paper prototype stimulation that users really enjoyed the microinteractions as they played around with the artifact. We plan to incorporate this feedback into our final design and our team is striving to incorporate these “moments of delight” unique to the artifact.
Virtual Scenes
Despite the re-focusing of the structure of our design as a linear timeline, our team still sees virtual spaces and interaction as critical in creating an immersive experience for our users, shown by our earlier research and testing. Therefore, rather than build virtual spaces that both organize the experience and immerse users in scenes out of Clemente’s life, we iterated upon our previous designs and are now using the linear timeline to lead into the virtual spaces themselves. Each of these represent a window into a particular aspect, time period, or location of Clemente’s life.
To create a functional prototype that works with our team’s time constraints, technical capacity, and our client’s expectations, we curated a selection of two such virtual spaces: one 360 scene, where users can freely pan the camera around Clemente’s Pittsburgh apartment, where he lived with his family, and one interactive scene, where users can trigger a baseball bat to hit a baseball in Three Rivers Stadium, where Clemente played in the last years of his career.
These two scenes were selected for their symbolic nature of central themes to Clemente’s life (family and baseball), as well as technical representations of what our client may implement after our prototype is complete. The principles of a 360 virtual space representing a real historical location or event, where users can explore artifacts freely, and an interactive scene using interaction and agency to communicate a narrative, can be implemented for other appropriate aspects of Clemente’s story.
Our team is currently designing and developing these virtual spaces in Unity, taking care to both design the environment and develop the code that powers our prototype. As fast as we’re designing them, we’re also developing the features of interaction, movement, and affordances that ensure usability accompanies immersion.
Social Elements
A final component that is crucial to our prototype is an opportunity for social engagement in our experience. As we’ve learned through secondary research from our Spring semester, museums are no longer just a collection of artifacts and stories that educate the current generation and connect the past and present. It has evolved into a medium for self-reflection and social engagement, bringing communities together. We also saw this first-hand during our interview with target audience. They went to the museum with others and enjoyed having discussions about the artifacts they saw which lend themselves to share their own experiences and perspectives.
While we came up with several ideas from potentially allowing visitors to annotate throughout the timeline to favoring the artifacts they resonate with, we wanted to do more and create an opportunity for visitors to connect deeply with Clemente’s stories and share their own. Hence, we plan to develop a platform within our major events that link the user to a gallery of other visitors’ artifacts and stories and to share their own through prompt guide/ reflection questions. The questions will be inspired by Clemente’s story.
For example, after visitors have read Clemente’s story about becoming a family man, we expect to prompt the visitor to think about their best memories with their family and share their artifacts. We expect a reflection page to elicit a feeling of belonging and connection with one another. As seen in our interview with target users in the Spring semester, this also provides an opportunity for visitors to stop and think about Clemente’s stories they just read about which will help them better internalize and recall their experiences.
Next steps
So, we have a new direction in mind, including ways that we can incorporate moments of delight, collaboration, and immersion in our browser experience. We’re now deep into building the thing and putting it all together! Again, we want to develop a design that is basically ready to ship for our clients. This means that we’re doing lots of heads-down time this week in order to get to a high-fidelity prototype to test. So far, the response has been super positive.
Our clients and faculty love our aesthetic style and we’re sure users are going to love it too. With the summer semester dwindling down, we have one last sprint of testing left where we are going to finally have users go through the entire experience (from entry to extension!). We’re going to see how users navigate through the timeline and how they enjoy the 3D objects and immersive scenes. This is where we’ll do the most important validation. We’ll be asking questions like “Do users leave the experience inspired?”, “What do users learn about Roberto Clemente beyond baseball?”, and “Are users motivated to spread the word and share the experience with others?”.
We’re excited to bring this web experience to the public! A few more weeks and hopefully, we’ll have a live site to show you. We can’t wait and we hope you can’t either.
