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.