OTHER INTERACTIVE MUSEUMS RESEARCH

The museum experience is changing, technology is taking a new unseen told in how we intake information. For this reason I am looking at ways other museums around the world have used technology to enhance their museum experience.

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London science museum its the most popular interactive museum in England. It is very hands on, lit with colour rooms, it contains an IMAX cinema experience and experiment that the kids can get involved in too.

titanic-off-brighton_5564548_m.jpgW5 Interactive discovery centre is a great museum for it’s interactive experience, it has many hand things that can be used by the visitor such as a lie detector.

 

showcase-Chess_02.jpgAugmented reality has really taken museum experiences to another level, the company CHESS cultural heritage experience have created a brilliant service that matches the user to an already created person. Each persona has a different experience tailor made to them. It allows them to view additional information about the thing they are viewing in real time on the iPad screen. It creates an immersive story told experience using quizzes, games and information that can be accessed from home.

From researching the difference services available it is obvious that the experiences have been overloaded with information, and need to be cut back with a much more visual experience for the user. There are three elements that make up a museum experience;

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It is also apparent that museums are stereotypically old dusty rooms filled with old things and large amounts of text. This needs to change if the museum experience is to evolve, the information needs to be almost completely removed from the room and moved into the interactive experience on the device. The windows should be blocked and the lights dimmed so that it is possible to light up the relevant elements of the museums. This alone creates a much more interactive and immersive experience for the visitor.

References;
http://mashable.com/2011/09/14/high-tech-museums/#ZqqY4D46Hiqs
http://www.visitbritain.com/en/Travel-tips/Britain-for-kids-and-families/Top-10-interactive-museums.html
http://ec.europa.eu/programmes/horizon2020/en/news/making-museums-mobile-personalised-and-interactive-experience

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Fourth Design Stage

This final design stage was basically for me to iron out any small details that I disliked about my design, to allow it become the perfect design without any flaws. To begin this I added the last bits into the design that I thought were required. The first one was the images of the president Bush and Kennedy, I decided I wanted to make them look even more liker a picture so I thought the best way to do this would be to frame them in an old fashioned Polaroid, you can see here the old and the next version of these sections.

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The next change was at the end of the page, I currently had a page making the customer aware that there was an exhibition and how they could get involved, you can see the old one here;

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I decided that the whole purpose of the site was to get people to go to the exhibition, therefore I should try to drive sales as much as possible. I did this, by building into the page, a way of purchasing the tickets that didn’t take them away from their current experience, and was easy and simple to finish. The reason for this is that I found in many purchasing devices, in an application, there are in-app purchases, so I thought I should take full advantage of it and implement it into my design. You can see examples of in app purchasing here;

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So the original page has lost the prices of the ticket prices but has had the arrival of a “Buy tickets” button;

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The next three steps are as simple as possible to make it easy for the customer to complete the purchase without too much hassle;

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instead of boring white boxes I have opted for a design that fits in with the page, with the text inside the boxes so the customer is aware that it is indeed a text box. To make the customer aware of how easy the experience will be I have added a steps section at the top of the page so that they aware of how much more they need to do to complete the transaction. With total of just 9 boxes to fill in, the form is super simple and escalates the potential customer to a customer really quickly, without taking them away from their experience therefore giving them no chance to forget or think against the decision of purchasing the tickets.

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For the final page, I have opted to use emotive language rather than sales talk like “Your sale is complete” the reason for this is because of the overall experience I want the user to have, and I believe this way it is much more immersive by making it more of an experience than just spending money. I have added an image in the background of a few important politicians looking smug with the caption “It’s time see the truth for yourself” indicating that they do not represent the truth, this would follow the sort of bias perspective the exhibition is giving the viewer. I have also told the the viewer that they will receive a starter pack, again language is important in being consistent with the overall experience for the user, rather than saying they will receive the tickets in an envelope, they will receive a starter pack which contains other information about getting involved with the exhibition campaign, which would raise awareness of the exhibition & website generating more profit for the exhibition owners, which is, other than informing the user, the overall aim of the site.

Next important step was to start arranging the content using a grid so that it has consistent layout throughout the design. I found a 12 column grid which I arranged vertically, and the duplicated it and made it horizontal, I therefore had a modular grid with which I had to be able to layout my content the way it needed to done. you can see this grid here;

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Next, I created vertical guides within Illustrator to split the page into eighths, I did this so that I could have multiple ways of scaling and position objects within the design. This meant my design was consistent throughout and you can see these guides with grid on top of design below

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This meant I had a grid for the sizing of objects and the vertical positioning of the objects within the design while I used the guides to align the content horizontally.

Next was an easy but time consuming stage of going through the entire design resizing, reshaping and reorganising the entire design to make sure it fit in the grid. This meant the design had a much better hierarchy and the content flow was much better and allowed the viewer from get from to the top to the bottom much easier. You can see the grid on top of the final design here;

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I also redesigned the interactive sections to fit the grid and you can also see these here;

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I also added in couple of addition faded images to give it consistency with the other sections and you can see all these here;

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The Final Design is here;Mockup