We’ve recently been involved in in a proposal for a brand new museum, putting together ideas for a large number of different interactives which address a number of gallery needs and look at a wide range of content.

We always hit the same problem with these projects: that the ambition of the work far outstrips the available budgets. And one of the reasons for this is that we seem to re-invent the wheel for each new interactive.

I can’t talk about the museum in question for obvious reasons, so let’s invent one for a thought experiment. Let’s call it The Ian Museum.

It opens next year and has four main galleries - Piano Heroes, Tea,  Why Football is Dull - and Ian: the Man, the Myth. So that’s a wide range of topics that will typically require a wide range of interactives.

In the traditional model we look at each of the galleries, identify the gaps that could be filled with digital content and then try to come up a wide variety of interesting routes through that content. Let’s have some games, some digital microscopes, a huge electronic encylopedia, a virtual film studio, a massive interactive timeline, a live ‘Video Nation’ style board, a large image of me… the list can go on and on.

Here’s the thing. Why should we re-invent digital content delivery from gallery to gallery? We don’t re-invent the signage or images, beyond gallery or thematic styling, so why do it when bits and bytes are involved.  ‘Hey, we used English in the last Gallery, that’s old hat - let’s write these signs backwards!’

Maybe a better way forward is to create a more standard set of interactives for a museum, the ‘bread and butter’ digital access points to more content. And maybe we shouldn’t give users access to vast swathes of content, maybe we should concentrate on smaller areas and really do them justice in terms of storytelling, design and on-screen/on-wall/on-PDA/on-whatever interaction. Maybe less is more.

Let’s be clear here. I am not advocating a reduction in digital content in museums. For one thing, I’d be doing myself out of a job. There is still room for ‘big ticket’ items in each gallery (that Big Experience thing I’m always going on about) but if we can streamline a large chunk of digital delivery and exploit the efficiencies inherent in this approach then there is more budget left in the pot for the ‘wow! factor’ installations we all love and want.

With that in mind, here’s my Less Is More Manifesto (drum roll…)

We should spend more time doing a smaller number of things really, really well

We should not provide endless amounts of information that the general public don’t want.

Let’s not provide high production value study areas for students and academics. Give them the content they need but deliver it in a more straightforward (i.e. cheaper) manner.

The average museum visitor (and yes I know there probably isn’t one but I never said my manifesto was perfect)  does not expect to come out of a gallery suddenly raised to the level of subject expert, so there’s no need to bombard them with too much information.

The onus is on museums and companies like Cogapp to provide simple and compelling digital experiences that concentrate on the key information, the most relevant stories.

Digital storytelling is a fabulous and flexible way to impart information and just because it can show a million pictures, doesn’t mean it has to.

Finding common ways to distribute information around a gallery or museum frees up budget and time for The Big Experiences. And every gallery needs some of those!

Finally, free 3G iPhones for all museum developers would be nice. But I might be out of luck with that one.

Of course this approach doesn’t work for every gallery and there is always a place for digital collections (at which Cogapp are notable practioners cough cough) but perhaps if we can find some simple but engaging ways of delivering smaller amounts of premium content, which can be duplicated and distributed around a gallery/museum (with due reference to gallery styling etc.) we can free up limited budgets for fewer, but perhaps more successful, big installations. It won’t work all the time, but it might work for some of it.

Right. I need a cup of tea. Now which museum would tell me about that..?

What is a prototype?
A prototype is a rough mock-up of your current approach to your project (be it for a website, an interactive, or something else).

It doesn’t have to be full of content. In fact, we often test with a mixture of guide content and lorem ipsum placeholder text, and it’s not unheard of to have a totally black and white prototype with boxes instead of images.

Why make a prototype?
Prototyping has some big advantages. It helps us plan how the screens will work functionally, as well as graphically.

By testing a protoype with users, we can quickly identify where we’re going right and where we’re going wrong, whilst there is still time to make changes. Wherever possible we test version one with users, make changes and then test version two. Often this rapid approach will be done between a morning and afternoon session, allowing us to take great strides in a single day’s work.

Read the rest of this entry »

This weekend I took my family to Portsmouth and up to the top of the Spinnaker Tower. On the first viewing level, some 100 metres above the harbour, is probably the simplest and most effective interactive exhibit in the UK. It’s a hole in the floor, covered in glass - and you walk on it. That’s it.

It is straightforward. You can’t get much more straightforward than a hole in the floor.

It is easy to understand. The only instructions are ‘please take off your shoes’.

There is no unnecessary information. It would have been tempting to place a touchscreen nearby but that would have ruined the simplicity of the experience.

It is absolutely thrilling. Your brain tells you the glass must be safe. Every other part of you screams ‘get off it now!’

It is interactive at a fundamental level. You don’t change it, it changes you (see the screaming above).

Visitors use and enjoy it their own way. My toddler ran happily over it, blissfully unaware of the massive drop below him; a young boy lay on it, drawing the view below; teenagers dared each other to stand on it and jump up and down; and adults tried very hard not to be too chicken about the whole thing.

The view from the tower is astounding. There is a nifty interactive map on the second viewing level and there are all sorts of readouts and videos as you wait to ascend. But the thing everyone talks about is the hole in the floor. It is simple and brilliant.

It takes full advantage of the single most thrilling aspect of the Tower - that you are a very very long way up.

It gives users a unique and dramatic experience that cannot be replicated anywhere else. And that must be a good thing.

On Monday, Joe and I attended the Museum Association’s event, Senses Working Overtime: Optimising interactive exhibits, which was held at the Churchill Museum in London.

It was a great day; we both met and talked to lots of interesting people. And of the many issues that came out of the various lectures and discussions my top two were:
Read the rest of this entry »

As part of an information architecture (IA) project, we have been looking into different ways of usefully analysing the results of card sorts.

What is card sorting?
Card sorting is a quick and informative way of finding out how users group information. It is often the first step to developing a site IA.

Open or closed?
Open card sorting works by giving users an unsorted number of cards, each with a user goal written on, and asking the user to organise the cards into groups that make sense to them. They then name the groups themselves. Some users go through the cards in a very structured way; others start by throwing them across the table.

Quantitative or qualitative?
In a quantitative card sort, the facilitator (usually us) takes quite a back seat, allowing the testers (often in groups of four) to get on with it. Quantitative sorts are to get the number of results we need to analyse.

In a qualitative card sort the facilitator is more involved, asking for a running commentary on why the tester is grouping cards together and the thinking behind it. This helps us when we analyse the data and work on the IA as we have an idea of user thinking.

We usually use a combination of these two methods to get our results, often with a rough 50/50 split.

The cards and goals
The goals on cards should always be research-based. Card sorting is a research-based exercise, and it’s results are dependent on the quality of the goals used to sort.

On a recent Cogapp project, we conducted the following before undertaking card sorting:

• A heuristic site evaluation
• Review of existing research
• Stakeholder interviews which provided organisational goals
• User depth interviews which provided a number of user goals
• Strategy workshop to prioritise user goals and organisational goals

In this example, we held a strategy workshop with our client where we analysed the goals that had come out of the user research and prioritised the organisational need against the user need, shown below.
Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC’s new home page has recently come out of beta and is available for all to see. It’s great to see an organisation like the BBC moving forward with this approach but I think it raises some questions:

1. It’s interesting to note which elements are customisable and which are not, most notably the large banner area near the top right hand corner of the page.

2. Whilst you can choose which news feeds you view, you can’t sort them in any meaningful way - I’d like to see this in a future release.

3. The BBC iPlayer widget seems redundant (on my poor Mac at any rate)

4. It is good to see search so prominently placed in the middle of the top navigation bar.

5. As potential downside to this approach: does it set users’ expectations too high about the rest of the site? Click on any link and you leave the whizzy customisable home page for a distinctly non-customisable destination.

Updating a site of this size is like painting the Forth Bridge (using old-fashioned paint) and it will never be completely uniform in terms of features and design, but I think it raises an interesting question of how much a home page should set the tone of all following pages.

Finally, as an old person I welcome the 1970s clock in the right hand corner. Completely unnecessary, a whimsical indulgence - but let’s hope the web always has room for these. I’m now waiting for the test card girl to make another appearance - as long as it’s not the scary one from Life on Mars…

I got the opportunity to speak at an event held by the Usability Professionals Association and LBi a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel on ‘openness of information and communities in Healthcare.’

Also there, were members of the NHS Connecting for Health team, who are developing some amazing interfaces and hardware, including this rather nice tablet.

The tablet has quite an interesting story behind it. Designed to be used by health care workers in hospitals, it has to meet an amazing list of requirements. The initial spec. was drawn up by the Connecting for Health team, and taken round a variety of manufacturers, they said they wanted something that was wipe clean, could be dropped without damage, had a five hour battery life, could be immersed in alcohol for sterilizing, had wifi, secure bluetooth, biometric security, barcode scanner, rf-id scanner, camera and just about everything else, for under £1000. Amazingly they now have the machine.

I spoke briefly on how we need to look beyond simply delivering health information, and understand the barriers to behavioural change that stop people getting the health outcomes they want. I was very pleased when, later in the day, the results of the user research project for the NHS Choices site was presented by another team. These findings broadly vindicated my position, and the fact that we are getting the same findings, on a research project that is a fraction of the size, really supports our approach.

For those interested, click the link for an outline of my talk:
Read the rest of this entry »

This followed an email from Tim about the playful user interface at etsy, for instance the colour browser which is particularly interesting to us, as Tim wrote a prototype for a similar thing for the MoMA.Guide a year or so ago.

So it reminded me that when I was on holiday I was thinking we needed to start have a discussion on the current developments in user interface technology. Not only in terms of original methods of existing navigation, but also what people are doing to reinvent the way we interact with electronic media.

Click the link below the video to continue reading.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to an article in The Economist the phenomenon of user generated content has infected healthcare with millions of people contributing information about healthcare topics ranging from avian flu to acupuncture and infertility.

According to market research firm Jupiter over 20% of American internet users have created some sort of health-related content.

The Economist argues that this explosion is driven in part by the broader internet trend of more people with broadband access and easier to use software that makes content creation much simpler. But it also argues, and our experience of running the Kidney Patient Guide supports this, that for those people with chronic or rare conditions it can be a fantastic way of getting information and support from other people in similar situations.

In some ways The Economist believes this boom in health care information is strange given that our health is generally regarded as a private matter and often not even discussed with other families and friends. This is one reason why the web is such an excellent forum - the user can decide how much or how little of their life and condition they want to reveal, and it is often easier to talk to strangers than it is to those we are close to. However, as the article points out it is important that users realise how permanent information can be online.

Another concern raised in the article is the issue of accuracy.

The article alleges that a lot of the user generated content is accurate and that according to a study in the British Medical Journal in 2004, a panel of neurology specialists judged that only 6% of information posted in the epilepsy-support group of the BrainTalk website was factually wrong and where there are a significant number of contributors misinformation is often quickly corrected.

As website managers we can’t be complacent about information as sensitive and important to people’s lives.

There must be safeguards and clear guidance for users. In this field it is particularly important to establish trust and credibility with your users. If content is user generated it should be evident to all that this is the case and there should be clear guidelines about the moderation policy and what are considered acceptable contributions. As with the group mentioned in the Economist article, in our experience with the Kidney Patient Guide the group of volunteer moderators and site users police the guidelines very actively themselves and quickly remove or inform us of any postings that breach these guidelines. A privacy policy and guidelines on how to safeguard your privacy online is also essential if you do solicit user contributions.

Transparency isn’t just for user-generated content.

For any health information the editorial policy should be made evident to users. From other research we have done for medical charities there are a number of factors that influence how users perceive your site.

For example, is your site or content sponsored; do you accept advertising; how long ago was the content updated and by who?

All this should be spelled out in your editorial policy, while displaying the last updated / reviewed date and author details on every content piece assists users to establish your credibility. Sites can also consider accreditation by an organisation devoted to upholding standards of health information such as the Health on the Net Foundation who accredit sites via their HONCode.

With these safeguards in place, the internet can provide a highly effective medium for people to find information and support for their healthcare issues.

Economist article: http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=9719054

There’s an interesting post by Nina Simon on her Museum 2.0 blog about how museums can learn from the gaming community about engaging with their community influencers.

Community influencers operate in the social space that surrounds a game and often have more influence with other users than those who have high scores. They are people who are highly engaged with the game, either positively or negatively and have “leadership, empathy for what people like and don’t like, ability to sooth ruffled feathers, articulate.”

With Museums increasingly operating in a virtual community whether they actively support them or not (visitor photos on Flickr, reviews on Trip Advisor, blog postings etc), there is an opportunity for Museums to reach out to their community influencers and engage with them, either as informal advocates or providers of valued feedback.

http://museumtwo.blogspot.com/2007/09/game-friday-supporting-community.html