Mobeum Hood Test Take Two

Mobeum Test at the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College on January 28, 2010

Thursday's pilot test at the Hood Museum of Art suggests that we achieved our goal of simplifying the mobile museum tour. Unlike the previous version which conflated browsing and tour, this new dedicated Mobeum Tour proved easy to use in the gallery and on the whole more satisfying to the test participants. The test group comprised three adult community members, admittedly a small sampling, but all three stated that Mobeum Tour was easy to use.

When asked if they would choose to use their cell phone to take a museum tour, and Mobeum in particular, they all answered yes. Ease of use figured among the reasons they gave:

• Learn more on individual basis
• Interesting and informative content
• Great way to access museum information
• Control over content and pace
• Don't have to rent a headset
• Hygiene
• Like idea of being able to go to museums virtually
• Easily accessible
• Easy to use
• Normally don't take tours but would with my own cell
• Great feature: visitor choice of "More about this object"
• Ability to zoom in on photo detail
• Enriched my experience of a gallery that I've always disregarded

This final point Mobeum Tour (enriched the experience of a gallery that I've always disregarded) prompted a long discussion about content creation. Participants concurred that they would be happy to go back to a museum over and over again, if the museum provided Mobeum Tours with good, varied and fresh content.

The debriefing resulted in a list of ideas for content themes, including: looking closely, art history, technique, composition, gossip, point/counterpoint. Participants also stated that additional content at the beginning and end of the tour would improve the experience and permit the museum to make a call to action: an orientation to Mobeum Tour with instructions on how to find its mobile and desktop browser versions, an introduction to the collection from the museum director and an envoy thanking the visitors and inviting them to friend the museum in order to stay in touch.

One test participant, threw out the idea that these tours could be an attractive lunch time option for colleagues in the College's faculty and staff. Since it is common for them to go to the gym or some place else to get a break, why not package the Mobeum Tour as a 30-60 minute mind workout.

The upshot of this study is that the technical barriers to Mobeum Tour have been lowered to the point that the most compelling issue is content creation. Assuming good content, Mobeum Tour provides an exciting possibility for the museum to capture new audiences and engage them in new ways.

Lessons Learned from Mobeum Pilot Test

As a result of last week's Mobeum test at the Hood Museum of Art, we learned that the user interface was too complicated. Although most of the testers said they liked the concept of a cell phone museum guide and browser, they said that the interface would have to be much simpler for them to use it. With this feedback in mind, we ripped out features that were irrelevant to a guide and redesigned the layout so that the learning curve for a first time visitor was zero.

Here is the interface of the Mobeum tour before (left) and after (right).

The interface of the earlier version is more busy, conflating the introduction to the collection and the objects. Note the row of icons in the navigation bar on the top, each one pointing to a feature. From left to right the icons indicate: Open Museum Home, Hood Museum, European collection (in yellow to indicate location), Object, Facet. There is also an option to sign in.

These icons indicate a range of features shared between the mobile and desktop browser versions of Open Museum. This correspondence between these browser versions makes sense because their use cases are similar, both of them permitting the user to explore collections from different museums throughout Open Museum. Although there are places that museum browsability would be very appealing, for instance the doctor's waiting room, the gallery is not usually one of them. While looking at art, the visitor doesn't usually want to browse but rather wants an easy to find audio guide and other pertinent information.

After struggling to figure out how to reconcile these vastly different purposes for the mobile, we came to the conclusion that we needed to create two distinct services, one for browsing and one for in museum tours. These two versions would draw content from the same back end, but deliver somewhat overlapping content and in different ways. Once we decided to spin off a separate guide, it was relatively easy to arrive at a streamlined museum tour. See how the image on the right separates the collection introduction from the tour and has fewer features and a simpler interface.

The decision to separate the mobile version into two distinct services came as an epiphanette, because until that moment we had been bogged down in thinking the two had to be combined. Our erroneous conception was due to the original inspiration for Open Museum going mobile, our hypothesis that the mobile web would permit museums to share their content in a way that could go viral.

In this blog post we explain our notion of the digital outreach viral loop. This video demonstrates how the mobile Open Museum can enhance the museum visitor experience and inspire them to share the museum's content with others through their personal social networks. A prerequisite for generating a digital outreach viral loop is a connection between the two mobile versions, as well as the desktop browser, because information must be able to flow smoothly between the three. This connection does not, however, entail their conflation nor one-to-one correspondence between feature sets and use cases. Each version has to perform its primary function well, but receive and transmit information to the others.

We've come to realize that there are at least two prerequisites for a successful Open Museum tour in the context of the digital outreach viral loop project. The mobile tour experience must be fully satisfying if the visitor is going to be enticed into registering. Assuming success in the mobile tour design, the second step will be to incorporate the optimal feature set so that museum visitors are captured as friends and can easily tap into their social networks.

Raw Mobeum Pilot Test Data

Here are the results of our first pilot test of Mobeum at the Hood Museum of Art. Eight students from a Dartmouth College museum seminar participated in the study, all of them women, half of them with a smartphone. The upshot (recounted in detail here) is that Mobeum's got great potential but needs to address three issues: intrusiveness of sound, ease of use, and quality of content.

Fortunately, all issues can be addressed and changes to the code and design are already underway and due for testing next week.

Scores given by Dartmouth College students testing Mobeum on January 19 in the Hood Museum of Art, reported by tester and her brand of cell phone.

Open Museum Mobile Test at the Hood Museum of Art

Dartmouth College students testing Mobeum in the Albright Gallery, the Hood Museum of Art, January 19, 2010

A couple of days ago we ran our first pilot test of Open Museum's mobile service, Mobeum. The test was conducted in the Albright Gallery of the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and focused on the Hood Open Museum European Collection. The test group consisted of nine Dartmouth college undergraduates enrolled in a museum seminar, all of them women, half of them using a smartphone (3 Blackberry, 1 ipod). The results, shared here, were informative but not surprising. On the whole, participants said Mobeum had great potential to enrich the visitor experience, but there were issues that needed to be addressed. These issues fell into three categories: intrusiveness of sound, ease of use, and quality of content. They also raised concerns about the penetration rate of smartphones and demographics of smartphone owners.

What many participants liked about Mobeum was the possibility of listening to (as well as, seeing and reading) pertinent information while in the gallery. Most were happy to be liberated from reading labels and interested in having the ability to search additional information at will. The kind of information they wanted to access included related works, other works by the same artist, point and counterpoint discussions by specialists, and gossip about the piece. They wanted this information to be high quality, clear and easily accessible. They wanted these enrichments while preserving the traditional quiet and tranquility of the gallery experience.

The first point, the intrusiveness of audio guides, is a problem but one that is easily addressed. Part of the appeal of visiting a gallery is an environment that sets the stage for what Nina Simon of Museum 2.0 calls rapture, whether the rapture be solitary or shared. Fortunately, there are a number of relatively easy solutions for reducing noise, ranging from instructing people on volume control to handing out headphones. In the short run, Open Museum plans to acquire inexpensive headphones to hand out at test sessions. We know from our local library that it is possible to make headsets available for about $1.50 (the price of the sets they sell at the front desk). There is some research to do on the which, where and how much of headphone purchase, but my bet is there is an easy and inexpensive way to make headphones available. This option could also work for museums, who could either sell or give away cheap headphones. We are also exploring what would be involved with museums acquiring a dozen or so higher quality, large sets to make available for loan (i.e. purchase cost, hygiene issues, logistics). Even in cash-strapped institutions, this kind of acquisition is probably fundable through an individual or corporate sponsorship, because mobile audio guides are sexy and the relative cost of headsets very low, paving the way to a lot of bang for the donor buck. Although it strikes me as best that museums provide headphones as part of an optimal access policy, it is merely a question of time until every visitor with a smartphone also carries their own. As one student participant pointed out, everyone with an iPod (nearly 100% of students on the Dartmouth campus) already carries a set wherever they go.

Ease of use, which is harder to solve than the problem of sound, can be improved in a number of ways, some of them immediately, some of them over the next three to six months of development. Mobeum (like the mother project, Open Museum) is in public alpha release, which means we will be constantly changing its look, feel, performance and functionality in response to test feedback and according to long-term plans. For example, this week's test participants made it loud and clear that Mobeum needs a "next" button to move from object to object in the gallery. We already knew we needed one but needed to observe how people used the service (to connect, navigate, make choices) and what they considered "next" (i.e. new object or more information about this object). Interestingly, most people seemed to assume that there was a "right" order to view the objects and they were happy to follow in that order when "on the tour."

In response to the test results, we will revise Mobeum and launch a second test next week. Embracing an organic approach to design, (design-development-test-design-development...), we will conduct dozens of iterations of this cycle before full public release in the spring. Simultaneously, working from a long-term plan, we will introduce new features, such as social networking, that will permit visitors to share their experience via social networks and enable the museum to share announcements and capture them as friends.

The third issue raised was content creation -- the key to Mobeum's ultimate success and the area that does not fall entirely within our purview. We're in good stead with our pilot partner, the Hood, because they are in perfect agreement that online content needs to be high quality and the Hood should be intimately involved in its creation. We believe the first step to good content is a good team, one whose collective membership has access to information (i.e. knowledge, images, audio, video) and the skill set to deliver it online. It is not a question of hierarchy, authority, or permission but rather a question of identifying roles, establishing work flow and constantly communicating.

As for the smartphone, sales are projected to grow rapidly and as they grow, it is predicted that costs will drop, by as much as 1/2 in two years. As people transition to the smartphone, smart features such as the "QR code readers" (bar code scanners) will be automatically built into the device. Already, the camera in Japanese cell phones read these bar codes which are present all over Japan. An example of how Open Museum is preparing for the future, Mobeum automatically generates QR codes for every object. At this point, it may appear to be a flashy gimmick, but our intent is to test an application that may soon become a standard menu option.

It is always tricky to plan for the future, but our goal is to build Mobeum in such a way that museum partners will be ready to welcome the first gallery visitor with a smartphone who is eager to engage with their collections.

Open Museum Goes Mobile

There are various kinds of Smartphone (cell phones and other mobile devices with browser) available today. To give an idea how fast their use is growing, the iphone has become the camera most often used to upload photos on Flickr.

Open Museum, like other forward looking web services, is going mobile. It's a question of survival. My bet is that within (well within!) 3 years, most of the world's population 13 and older will be carrying some kind of mobile device that connects to the internet. I also bet that high speed internet will become available everywhere people live -- even the hills of Vermont where until today we've been hobbling along via satellite.

Going mobile also makes good business sense for museums. After all their core mission is making their collections available to the public and disseminating information about these collections. Hard hit by the economic crisis and competition from a plethora of recreation and information alternatives, museums know that they have to remake themselves with a more pertinent, participatory and friendly public face. The mobile web offers exciting possibilities for this kind of make over.

Given these developments, the time has come for museums to leverage their visitors' mobile devices. The cell phone can help disseminate more information to more people in a more user friendly and participatory way. It can also enhance the visitor's gallery experience by providing audio guides and visitor choice about additional information. Finally, with Open Museum's support, it can do so at no cost to the museum for hardware, software or technical support. Cell phone connection provides an opportunity for museums to capture new audiences and generate deeper connections with existing audiences.

To help museums go mobile, Open Museum is developing Mobeum, a mobile service that enables browsing any time, any place from mobile device and enhances museum visits through various features, most notably audio guides. Mobeum is in alpha testing, preparing for public release in February.

In a nutshell, here's how Mobeum works. Every object in Open Museum is automatically assigned a code (number and bar code) that can be accessed by smart phones. For starters, we're focusing on Apple's Iphone and Google's Android, but other devices, such as the ITouch, Blackberry, and alternative phones with browser, can also connect. Once a curator has created an object in Open Museum, s/he can print out labels that include visitor cell phone access codes and a set of instructions for use.

In the gallery, the visitor is presented with three options for connecting to Mobeum via their cell phone: a free text message, a URL or a, a bar code read by a scanner applications (such as Optiscan, my personal favorite). QR code readers, which are already standard on Japanese phone, will without a doubt soon be built into every smart phone. Whichever route the visitor chooses, they will end up looking at and image of the first object and a bunch of choices for further activity, including audio guide, more information, bigger image, friend this museum and favorite (bookmark) this object. These options will eventually include other participatory options and tap into social networks, such as twitter and Facebook, as can be done in Open Museum desktop view.

We invite you to visit Open Museum on your mobile device and tell us what you think. By the way, we're also testing the name Mobeum and would welcome your feedback.

Turn Up the Volume--Audio Tours

I've been doing a little research on audio tours in museums. I don't like them, in general, mostly because for me, the timing is never right. The narrator either goes on way too long, or he (or she) talks about aspects of the artwork that I don't particularly find interesting, or assumes I know a heck of a lot more about art than I do. And sometimes the audio tour does all three: goes on way too long, name dropping about periods and people that I haven't heard of and telling me about every single aspect of work, when a little drive-by information would have suited me just fine. So when we decided to experiment with adding short audio tours to some of the works on Open Museum, we agreed that the few essentials would be that they'd be short, interesting, and talk about what you see in front of you.

We've started with some of the installations in the Likeness collection in the Mattress Factory museum. Most of the objects in this collection are room-sized installations that are best experienced in person to really appreciate the concept behind them. But with a combination of still images, video, and a short audio tour, we think we're doing the exceptional installations justice in their online form. Next up for audio tours are the objects in the Hood Museum of Art's European collection. Our plan there is to add audio tours that focus on the interesting activity that's going on in the painting, and maybe add a little gossip about the painters and their subjects. After all, what was a painting back in the day but People magazine on canvas?

So when you get a chance, click on an audio tour or two and let us know if you like what we're doing. If not, they are easy to fix and we'd like to get it right.

Technology and Humanity: "Likeness"

What does it mean to be human in a technology-driven age? How does technology affect the depiction of humans? These are the questions explored in "Likeness", the newest collection in The Mattress Factory on Open Museum. The Mattress Factory is a contemporary art museum located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that presents art in room-sized exhibits. "Likeness" is its most recent group exhibition, and is being simultaneously shown in the bricks and mortar space in Pittsburgh, as well as online at Open Museum.

"Likeness" explores how technology affects, distorts, confuses, and even deceives our perceptions of the attributes that make us quintessentially human. The artists in "Likenesses" toy with our ideas of humanness through a variety of media: LED lights, filters, projection screens, even Powerpoint presentations. Jim Campbell's"Liz Walking" , for example, uses LED lights, filters, and screens to explore the limits of human understanding--Campbell's work asks, what is the least amount of information a human brain needs to understand and interpret movement? Peter Demarinis's work, "Dust" focuses on facial recognition and similarities, and how technology can enhance and distort them. Tony Oersler's Vampiric Battle"" explores how we use technology voluntarily to distort our own images, and focuses on the concept of "lookism," what he considers the most socially acceptable form or prejudice today. And Jonn Herschend's "Self Portrait as Power Point Proposal for an Amusement Park Ride" looks at both sides of a personal narrative (or person): the polished, public persona, and the messy, unfinished private side that is hidden from the public.

The Mattress Factory's Likeness exhibit runs from October 10, 2009 to March 21, 2010 in its bricks and mortar location, but will be perpetually available here on Open Museum. Thanks to technology, of course.