Case Study: Tellyscope. An app that enriches your museum experiences.
Imagine going to museums, specially natural history museums, will it be fun for you, adults? Thanks to the internet and all the UX that museums have considered for you, you can purchase a ticket in advance and skip the line, and navigate precisely within the museum — huge highlights for your trip. However, have you ever wondered why do you always get bored in the museums? Are you looking for some experiences beyond what museums are offering you physically? With augmented reality technology, your smartphone can make it happen.
This case study describes the process of our team went through when designing Tellyscope that provide educational and multi-sensory experiences for museum visitors.
1. BACKGROUND
Brand Partner — American Museum of Natural History
We are excited to work with The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) as they are in a great position to innovate in the museum space and continue their mission of discovery and human enlightenment. AMNH caters to tourists as well as educational groups and visitors seeking an exciting learning experience, making AR a logical next step, particularly in the context of the museum’s fossil and animal collections. The museum has previously invested in an AR indoor navigation app for visitors, showing an openness to innovation and providing an excellent visitor experience.
Working with AMNH would be a mutually beneficial relationship. For AMNH, Tellyscope could drive ticket and museum store sales as well as membership, while forwarding their educational mission. For Tellyscope, AMNH would be a headline venue to debut our AR experience and demonstrate it as a platform for other museums and future partners.
Product Principle
In order to stay aligned with the mission of the museum as well as our own goals to help museum visitors, we set the following principles around our product:
- Promote learning — We’ll work with our partner to promote learning
through tailored, multi-sensory engagement. - Inspire imagination — We’ll reward curiosity with delightful experiences and inspire people of all ages to experience museums through a more imaginative lens.
- Connect history and science — We’ll bring history to life by showing it in context and providing opportunities to explore the underlying science.
- Promote learning — We’ll provide museums with new ways to share their wealth of knowledge and inspire visitors to be patrons and lifelong learners.
Assumptions+Hypothesis
- Visitors find it difficult to navigate and learn from specific exhibitions.
- Today’s museum visitors want more fun and interactivity from their experiences.
- Today’s museum visitors want an individualized tour experience.
Natural history museums could provide visitors with a more enjoyable learning experience by making the experience more interactive.
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2. RESEARCH
Affinity Mapping
We created an affinity map, grouping the observations from these interviews to draw out key insights about the museum experience.
Synthesizing Insights
- Visitors consider both the quality and diversity of a museum’s content before visiting.
- Museum visitors want to be more than just passive spectators and have an interactive or immersive experience.
- Visitors find museums more educational and more enjoyable when they’re provided with a meaningful context for exhibits.
- Audio guides don’t always meet the expectations of visitors in their current form.
- The museum experience is imperfect and there are opportunities to improve it.
- Visitors see their museum experiences as something highly individual.
- Museum visitors can have negative assumptions about natural history museums and the experience they provide.
Persona
Synthesizing our key research insights, we created a persona to represent the aggregate of our users and their wants and needs. Zoe is an enthusiastic and curious learner who wants to take advantage of New York’s many museums but has some reservations about the museum experience, which in the past has been dry and even boring.
Journey Map
To further empathize with Zoe, we put together a high-level journey map of a typical museum experience for her, which is fraught with frustrations but also opportunities for us to help address through our product:
Problem Statement
Our initial hypothesis was validated through our research. Having gained a sense of museum visitors’ needs, we iterated on our hypothesis and used it as our focal challenge statement as we developed our product:
Museums are not consistently meeting visitors’ expectations for intellectual and multi-sensory engagement, while Zoe seeks a museum experience that is enjoyable, engaging, and educational. How might we enhance Zoe’s museum experience to be both engaging and informative?
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3. DESIGN
MoSCoW Map
We placed all the potential features that could go into the product onto a MoSCoW map. This allowed us to decide as a team the core, essential features of the app.
Feature Prioritization Matrix
Given that AR products can be complex and offer countless potential features, we created a Feature Prioritization Matrix to help us visualize the feasibility of each feature in addition to its level of priority from Zoe’s perspective.
We ultimately decided that the main features of the product would be the following:
- Audio + text guide
- AR informative touchpoints
- Contextual animations and adornments (habitat, historical setting, etc.)
- Environmental and animal sound effects
- Help and troubleshooting
Design Studio
Having defined our platform and features, we conducted a round of design studio as a group to sketch the main functions of the app and rapidly iterate on the initial design.
Mid-Fidelity Prototype
- Feature + Function Outline
The final sketches from our design studio were turned into mid-fidelity wireframes, with the design layout and functionalities fleshed out. The mid-fi prototype functionality is outlined below:
2. Mid-Fidelity Wireflows
- Activate the AR “fun facts” feature
- Listen to the audio guide while following its transcript
- Troubleshoot an in-app issue involving the AR effects
- Turn on/off the immersive sound effects
3. Mid-Fidelity Usability Testing
We conducted the 1st round usability testing on a desktop computer using a simulated mobile prototype. The first round of testing was overall successful: no participant failed any of the tasks, completing them in a short amount of time and rating each task as relatively easy. We received positive feedback on the ease of using the app and how the AR feature would enhance the museum experience. We iterated on the design based on participants’ comments, applying these changes to the high-fidelity prototype.
4. Opportunities for Iteration
1). Remove the numbers and have the callout points to be colored orbs.
Issue addressed: The numbered callouts implies that the user must interact with them in that order (which is not the intention).
2). Remove this status box completely — if it has no function, it has no place in the design.
Issue addressed: Many participants wanted to tap the “AR Active” status box (which has no function but to indicate to the user that the AR mode is working).
3). Keep the Help feature because it is standard but will revise the copy to make its intentions clearer.
Issue addressed: Participants had the most trouble completing the troubleshooting task using the Help feature.
4). Revise icon to be more recognizable (add eye socket to dinosaur head).
Issue addressed: One participant didn’t recognize the dinosaur + sound icon.
5). Add zoom feature.
6). Allow users an option to adjust depth of information: easy (children), medium (adults), advanced (enthusiasts).
7). Remove opening screens to choose the museum, as we narrowed our potential partnership to start with just the American Museum of Natural History.
High-Fidelity Prototype
Our product was created mainly from an interactive camera view, where you can get your information to enrich your experiences according to your personal goals.
1. Key Features
2. High-Fidelity Prototypes Wireflows
- Start the AR experience and learn more about the T. rex
- Turn on the audio guide + read along with its transcript
- Troubleshoot an in-app issue
- Turn on the sound effects
- Use the zoom feature
- Adjust the knowledge depth setting
3. High-Fidelity Prototype Usability Testing
We included two more questions in the second round of testing to test features that were added to the high-fidelity prototype: image zoom and knowledge depth control. All participants were able to complete all tasks in a significantly shorter amount of time compared to the first round.
4. Opportunities for Iteration
1). Add a toggle to turn on/off the animations.
Issue to address: Some users found the animations to be distracting. Others would’ve liked to see finer levels of AR or be able to turn the AR on/off (to save battery).
2). Iterate on the icon designs and/or add clarifying labels underneath each.
Issue to address: There was uncertainty in the audio guide and sound effects icons, and what they meant/how they were different from each other.
3). Add an additional screen before loading the AR to quickly familiarize users.
Issue to address: The app could have an introduction, a quick user guide, to AR technology and how to use it.
4). Allow users to choose the knowledge level in a Settings screen of some kind before the AR experience or from the AR screen.
Issue to address: Some users were unsure about the labeling for the knowledge levels.
5). Add a camera shutter to allow photos.
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4. NEXT STEP
- Iterate the design of our high-fidelity prototype based on feedback from the usability tests, as outlined above.
- Integrate our product with core technologies to support its key functionalities:
1). AR technology: Google’s ARCore for iOS + Android
2). Museum collection API’s
- Ensure that the physical space of AMNH is primed to work seamlessly with Tellyscope.
1). Robust Wi-Fi
2). Signage around AR-enabled exhibits
- Build out our platform for cross-genre experiences (e.g., art, history, science) to become the one-stop app for AR museum experiences.
We’ll provide museums with new ways to share their knowledge and inspire visitors to be patrons and lifelong learners.
Special thanks to our teammates:
Maria Tsuji and Peter Berexa
