¡Verano! The Clemente Team Heats Up
“¡Verano!” means summer in Spanish.
Buenos Días! The sun rises on our third and final summer semester and we are pumped to jump right in. The first super exciting update is that our whole team is finally all in Pittsburgh! We have been loving the in-person opportunities to meet with each other. Team bonding has never looked so good.
Since our presentation, we’ve been conducting research non-stop. We finished up our storyboard testing and got an idea of people’s most-loved (and most-hated) ideas. This activity, coupled with feedback from our client, helped us a lot when we got back for the summer.
https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lBBgcTc=/
This also means that we have been spending long days at the MHCI lab and at the Clemente Museum. Our most recent activity has been a fly-on-the-wall experiment where we follow a docent on a tour to understand how they personalize tours and which artifacts they highlight. We pretended to be Pitt students in order to get an unbiased look at the museum for ourselves. Plus, this was several members’ first times touring the museum!
One new player that we’ve added to the mix is our faculty adviser, Ellen Ayoob! This past week we attended our first two faculty feedback sessions in person. It was great being able to hear critique and advice face-to-face and we even got to hand Ellen a shirt from the museum. Thanks again, Duane!
With the spring semester behind us, we are ready to charge our creative juices and begin ideating! In fact, before we began our summer semester, we conducted an ideation session with our clients, Duane, Rob, and KC, where we showed them our storyboards and gathered their reactions and feedback. They also got the chance to experience a fun game where they ideated possible solutions based on multiple “how might we” statements, with each statement encompassing a theme and a constraint.
On that note, it was important for our team to engage in discussion about the constraints and considerations that would direct our project. We revisited the four main design considerations we’ve developed over the research phase and came to a few conclusions.
Constraints and Considerations:
- Our main audience will be young adults, those aged 18–30 years old.
- The core focus of the experience will be digital storytelling to provide a cohesive and coherent experience about Roberto.
- The experience will be housed in a web-browser.
- Our virtual experience will feature digitized artifacts.
- It will also include an opportunity for social interaction and reflection.
Our clients emphasized their goal of reaching a younger target audience as well as considering the repeatability of the experience — incentivizing people to revisit. There was also a desire to tie aspects of the virtual experience to the physical experience, whether it involved offering the virtual experience on iPads or monitors at the museum (which they’re working to obtain), or specific elements in the virtual experience that could encourage people to visit the museum.
During the summer semester, our team will engage in “sprints” which allow us to generate, test, and validate ideas in a short amount of time. Each sprint will ideally last two weeks. During the first week, we will mainly devote our time to discuss directions and elements to test, quickly sketch ideas, and build them. Then, for the second week, we will bring these ideas to actual target users and get their feedback and reactions.
Keeping Duane, Rob, and KC’s feedback in mind along with our own team’s decisions, we then ideated individually and each came up with three potential experiences. As a team, we came together to share our ideas and picked out elements of each that we liked. After a few hours of whiteboarding, two prototypes emerged, which both capture elements that we were most excited about and believed had the most potential.
For our first sprint, we wanted to immediately address our most pressing question: How do we best deliver the life and legacy of Roberto Clemente in a virtual online environment?
To our team, exploration of a virtual space is an intriguing concept that offers potential for rich storytelling, and appeals to a younger audience. This concept is partly what informed our Minecraft pretotype months ago, and we wanted to take this further. A virtual space offers room for interactivity, but how should it be structured? We settled on a “spatial timeline,” in which the virtual space and the artifacts/stories inside it would change as users explored, through different eras of Clemente’s life. We believe this implicit timeline will give users a stronger sense of exploration and agency.
However, to avoid prematurely constraining ourselves to a virtual space, our team created a parallel prototype in the form of an interactive digital gallery, where more focus was placed on the artifact’s story itself, rather than its environment. By diverging on these two prototypes, our team hopes to collect valuable feedback that informs our future prototypes and designs.
The initial feedback on our two prototypes has proven promising. Over the last week, our research team recruited participants in our target audience, through social media (big shoutout to r/MuseumPros). We presented both prototypes to seven research participants, gathering their preferences, likes and dislikes.
Our early findings suggest that our target audience is indeed interested in an experience that includes a virtual space — many users enjoyed having a guided path for exploration, and many users expressed that the timeline was useful as a reference point for where they are in Clemente’s life. Yet, we found that users also greatly enjoyed the multimodal and deep-diving aspects of our second prototype, which included text, video, interactive artifacts, and user reflections.
Instead of choosing one prototype or the other, our team plans to integrate elements from each prototype into our subsequent designs. For Sprint #2, we plan to continue to develop the virtual environment and incorporate aspects from our other prototypes, as well as further build upon the visual fidelity, user flow, and interactivity. Get ready, world. We’re coming for you.
Signing Off,
Team Clemente
