¡Voltea la página! Team Clemente Pivots and Pushes Forward
¡Voltea la página! means “turn the page” in Spanish.
¡Bienvenidos de nuevo! Since our last post, we’ve been hard at work going through the full swing of our research cycle — ideating, designing, researching, and refining. Rinse and repeat.
For Sprint #2 of our summer semester, we took bold steps in hashing out what we imagined could be a final deliverable for the Clemente Museum: an online storytelling experience that combines virtual environment and artifacts from different points in Roberto Clemente’s life.
We broke ourselves into two subteams — one focused on the design, which handled building out our initial prototype tests and creating an overall structure of delivery, and another focused on recruitment and user testing of our prototypes.
Previously, 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. Naturally, our team started designing the layout of the virtual space. After a long ideation session, we decided to orient the user using a virtual scrapbook to introduce the different eras of Clemente’s life and allow the user to enter the virtual space using the scrapbook. The virtual space itself was broken down by the different eras where the users are able to navigate vertically to move chronologically and horizontally to navigate between Pittsburgh and Puerto Rico, two locations significant for Roberto Clemente.
As we made design decisions about the virtual space, we had pressing questions. Does the scrapbook skeuomorphism help orient the experience? Are the users easily able to navigate the virtual space we’ve designed? Are there additional affordances needed? We needed to test the flow and logic of the overall structure of the virtual space with the user. But how do we test this quickly without actually building a whole virtual space?
We opted to recreate the virtual space using a paper prototype on Figma! We gave users time to explore the virtual space at their own pace and asked to think aloud.
Because we envisioned each artifact to open to its own detail pages, we simultaneously tested for which layout allowed users to consume the information and story the best. We quickly drafted several layouts for the artifact detail pages on Figma as well and presented these options in front of the user. We asked them to rank their preference and probed to understand why.
Interestingly, users had differing opinions about the layout of the artifact detail pages. Therefore, we decided to present it to more users until we start to notice a pattern in their responses. In the meantime, we gained valuable feedback from users about the overall virtual space and navigation.
Users loved the immersiveness that the virtual space offered. Navigating in a 3D space (albeit with a paper prototype) allowed them to “feel like (they were) in his house or his life”. It offered an interesting and engaging way of exploring and learning about Roberto Clemente.
However, navigation wasn’t always easy. Users were confused with what moving left and right or up and down meant. Offering navigation through both the scrapbook and virtual space also proved to be too complicated. It was difficult to understand how these two ways of navigation came together.
It became clear to us that while the virtual space offered novelty and immersiveness, we needed to provide more affordances and look to simpler and more easily understandable ways of navigation.
Our work this semester has been an ongoing process, and we’ve looked for feedback not only from our users, but our client as well. In the past week, we’ve had to pivot quickly, as our client raised concerns about the virtual space, such as its historical accuracy and reception by hardcore baseball fans or older audiences. While these were not necessarily the audiences our project scope originally included, we recognize that, depending on where this virtual experience will live, the older patrons of the physical museum and baseball fans will access it, and may have such reservations about a virtual space, especially one with a complex navigation.
This past sprint has been a lesson for our team, to strive to elicit feedback from our client consistently and earnestly.
In response, our team has gone back to the drawing board, ideated, and prototyped several alternative structures. Each of these pare back the complexity of the virtual experience, so that the focus is realigned squarely upon the artifacts and stories themselves. One of the prototypes still includes a very simplified virtual space, while the others investigate new methods of organization.
So where did we end up? Short answer, we’re pivoting towards a less complex organization of artifacts and stories, and letting our users tell us what structure they like the best.
From there, we’re going to build out a working prototype and test with users that are actually Puerto Rican. This has been a gap in our research for awhile and we’re glad to announce that we will be testing with this important audience during this next sprint!
Thus begins the mad dash to the end of the summer. We’re ready. Are you?
